“He didn’t give you this?” said he, pulling out of his pocket a silver vase.
“No.”
At this Minerva actually began to sob. “Oh, Mist. Vernon, how could you say that? I found that vase in the kitchen this morning, and this man says it was stolen from them people. Oh, why did I come up here?”
“Philip, you might as well tell the whole story,” said Ethel, coming back from the parlour. “We’ll probably lose Minerva now, anyway.”
“So there is a story,” said the constable, crossing his legs in a most irritating way. In fact he couldn’t have done anything that would not have been irritating.
I saw that the best thing to do was to tell the truth, ridiculous as it might sound with Minerva there. Indeed, the very fact of my telling it might soften the girl and show her how much we were willing to descend in our efforts to keep her valuable services. But I made a wrong start. I said:
“I knew that the man was a burglar—”
Minerva immediately burst out sobbing and left the kitchen and went to her room, and my mental eye could see her remorselessly packing her trunk.
“Go on,” said the constable, and then, “Go outside,” said he to the mulatto.
“Well, now that they’ve gone,” said I in a relieved tone, “I can tell you the whole thing, farcical as it is. Have you a servant?”