The Countess was standing by a very handsome cabinet, a drawer of which she had opened, and called me up to her. "Come here, Johann, I want you to see me put these letters away," she said to my astonishment, and, drawing my attention to the neatness with which her letters and papers were arranged, asked me to remember precisely where she put those which had just arrived, and to make sure that the drawer was locked. "I want to have a witness," she added.
Then she spoke of Nessa's behaviour to me, saying how it had grieved and surprised her.
"It is really not of the least consequence," I assured her.
"But I'm sorely afraid it is, Johann, and I'm very troubled. That's one reason why I wished you to do that just now. I was always against her coming to the house, but Rosa would have her;" and then by degrees the reason came out.
She was afraid that von Erstein's story was true, that Nessa was really a spy. Some one had a key to her drawer in the cabinet; she had found her papers disturbed more than once; she kept money in the same place, but none of it had ever been taken, so that it could not be the work of a thief; she believed that Rosa's bureau had also been tampered with; and as the servants were above suspicion, there seemed to be only one conclusion.
The dear little lady was more grieved than angry about it. "I'm very sorry for Nessa really, Johann, but we can't have a spy in the house; yet I don't know how to get rid of her. But I won't open that drawer again until you are with me, and then we shall both know that I'm not making a mistake. Meanwhile, don't say anything to Rosa or any one."
We went upstairs together, and she was telling me the address of Hans' tailor and how I was to find it, when the old servant, Gretchen, passed us. Rosa was waiting dressed to go out, and told me she had spoken to Nessa, who would come down to me in the drawing-room after the rest had left the house.
"She baffles me, Johann. She just jumped at your offer to help her get away—after her conduct just now, too! But she seems to have taken a violent dislike to you, and even declared she wouldn't stop in the same house with you," she said in a tone of consternation.
I passed it off with a smile and some banal remark about feminine inconsistency, and went downstairs to wait for Nessa. There was a lounge at the end of the drawing-room, a big comfortable sort of winter garden, with lots of big plants, and rugs and easy chairs and so on, and I sat down there to think over the position. I didn't smoke; a lucky fact in view of things.
It worried me excessively that Nessa should be regarded as a spy, and I was puzzling over the explanation of what the Countess had told me when I heard the front door shut. That meant they had left the house and that Nessa would soon be down.