“I traced this girl to the situation she had procured through her former mistress, from that situation to another; finally, to small lodgings she was occupying in the neighbourhood of Newington Butts. I found her at home, and opened upon her at once on the subject of the rose-ring. To my amazement she broke into a passion of tears and half coherent protestations, denouncing, as I understood, her former fellow-servant Annie Milner for having brought the law on her—as she supposed, in my person. It was long before I could convince her that I was not a plain-clothes constable, long before I could quiet and reassure her; but I succeeded at length, and persuaded her little by little to make a full confession to me of the truth. And what do you think it was?”
“It was she who had stolen the rose-ring?”
“It was she—a mere impulsive misdemeanour—a mere sin of vanity, committed for the purpose of adorning a cherished hat—which hat still survived so adorned. Seeing the parcel of bright skins so little regarded she had succumbed one day to the temptation of the rose-ring, attracted by its eyes and its singularity, and had appropriated it to herself.
“But now observe the irony of circumstance—or was it, perhaps, an instance of subconscious telepathy, of simultaneous suggestion? Anyhow, it appeared, Annie Milner and I had conceived at the same moment the same hypothesis about this girl her former fellow-servant; only—Annie had been an hour or so beforehand with me in giving practical effect to her hypothesis. In short, she had paid a visit that very morning to Bessie Cotton during her dinner hour, had wormed the truth out of her, and had demanded the hat itself as the price of her silence. And Bessie had yielded up her plunder intact, and Annie had carried it away—whither?
“For a moment, as you may imagine, I felt completely nonplussed. And then it occurred to me that Annie, having already sacrificed her dinner time to this quest, would for certain postpone carrying her prize to Lower Marsh until after business hours. I acted promptly upon that conjecture—which fortunately proved the correct one—you shall hear with what result.”
Gilead then related to his absorbed listeners the adventure with which we are already acquainted.
“We cannot gather,” he said at the end, “whether the villain had predetermined upon murdering his victim, with a view to silencing an untrustworthy confederate, or whether, as he himself declares, she drove him to madness at the last by coquetting with him, witholding her capture, and threatening to give the whole thing away unless he agreed to her extravagant terms. The fact that he made a jealous preserve of the premises—which he was renting for a few weeks at a few shillings a week from a local landlord—the fact of the spade and mattock in the cellar—these are at least subjects for grave suspicion. But likely enough we shall never know the truth.”
“And the mystery, Mr Balm. O, Mr Balm—please!”
Gilead laughed at the impatient young lady, as he raised the parrakeet-skin from the table.
“I told you,” he said, “that there was but one missing link needed to complete the chain of evidence. That missing link was, of course, Captain Barclay Rivers’s letter, which was found on Lightfoot. It told, in brief, of the Captain’s startling discovery, among the ruins of a temple of Kandy in Ceylon, of an almost priceless gem; of his apprehensions that this treasure might be lost or stolen from him in his varied wanderings, and of his final determination to send it home in a parcel of the skins of birds shot by him, concealed within the head of a rose-ringed parrakeet, the only specimen of its kind, he was careful to explain—with an elaborate description of the bird for his wife’s instruction—that the bundle contained.”