“And did she?”
“She came, with great reluctance. But I was by then, I am afraid, so eager in the quest that I would have abducted her had she refused. My intention was to introduce her to the man as one of those fashionable acquaintances whose custom he had desired; but he saved me the trouble. As we approached the shop he himself, accompanied by the identical young woman of my former acquaintance, issued from it, and the two, unconscious of our presence (it was raining, and our umbrellas were up), went down the street before us. ‘There he is,’ I whispered; ‘and the very girl I told you about with him. Quick! Do you recognize either?’ ‘Both, I am sure,’ answered Mrs Rivers, much agitated. ‘The girl, I am certain, is Annie Milner, a former maid of mine, whom I had to send away for misconduct; and he—wait—I seem to know him; but I’m so flustered.’ At that moment the two stopped at a door, and the man knocked—a double rap. ‘O!’ said my companion on the instant. ‘I know him: He was a postman in our district.’ I started; I turned her swiftly about. I almost ran her from the neighbourhood—for she had given me in those few words the clue I desired, and from that moment everything was clear to me.”
“Mr Balm! How? O, please go on!”
“One moment. I went straight, after seeing her home, to Scotland Yard, and, by virtue of those same credentials, secured an examination of the portraits of convicted criminals. The man of Lower Marsh figured amongst them. ‘Who is he?’ I asked. ‘George Lightfoot’ was the answer; ‘a Kennington postman sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for letter-stealing, and discharged, after serving his term, within the last few weeks.’ There, Miss Halifax!”
“O! but I’m not there, indeed.”
“Why, you see, Captain Barclay Rivers had written a letter to his wife, telling her that he was forwarding the bale of skins, and mentioning a secret connected with one of them; and that letter Lightfoot had stolen amongst others. But, before he could formulate any plan for acting upon the information contained in it, he was trapped and arrested on another charge and sent to prison, only to find upon his release that the lady had been made a widow, and the bale sold and its contents scattered during his confinement. Hence his advertisement, and, generally, his determined efforts to trace the several items of the parcel; hence, moreover, his subornation and ruin of the unhappy girl at Mélanies’, whom he had known and courted when he was a postman and she a maid at Mrs Rivers’s, and whom he had, since his release, tracked to the shop in the Borough, and won to his nefarious purposes.”
“And you saw through it all in that single instant?”
“I will not go so far. But I had at least a vision of the truth. Still there remained to discover the nature of the secret, and the whereabouts of the lost skin—for by now I was convinced that the rose-ring, and the rose-ring alone, the one specimen of its kind which, it would seem, the parcel contained, held the solution of the mystery. Well, I discovered it; but at a fatal moment for one poor creature.”
“O, don’t stop!”
“I must hurry rather. There is much ground to cover in a few words. You will take for granted, Miss Halifax, the tedious process of inquiry they represent. In brief, I questioned Mrs Rivers as to her former ménage, and learned that in the time of Annie Milner there had been but one other servant in the house, namely a cook, Bessie Cotton by name. It was just possible that she might know something about the lost rose-ring.