“How did you ever guess that she was the one?” Eleanor asked at last.
“It just came over me,” Betty answered. “But, why, she doesn’t seem to care one bit!”
“About running into me?” asked Jean Eastman, appearing suddenly in the doorway. “Has she been doing damage in here, too?” No one answered and Jean gave a quick look about the room, noticing the rummaged drawers, the girls’ excited, tragic faces, and the jewelry that Eleanor still had in her hand. Then she made one of her haphazard deductions, whose accuracy was the terror of her enemies and the admiration of her followers.
“Oh, I see—it’s more college robber. So our dear Blunderbuss is the thief. I congratulate you, Eleanor, on the beautiful poetic justice of your having been the one to catch her.”
“Yes, she’s the thief,” said Betty, before Eleanor could answer. She had a sudden inspiration that the best way to treat Jean, now that she guessed so much, was to trust her with everything. “And she acts so strangely—she doesn’t seem to realize what she has done, and she doesn’t care a bit that we know it. She said——” And between them they gave Jean a full account of their interview with Miss Harrison.
Jean listened attentively. “It’s a pathetic case, isn’t it?” she said at last, with no trace of her mocking manner. “I wonder if she isn’t a kleptomaniac.”
Betty and Eleanor both looked puzzled and Jean explained the long word. “It means a person who has an irresistible desire to steal one particular kind of thing, not to use, but just for the sake of taking them, apparently. I heard of a woman once who stole napkins and piled them up in a closet in her house. It’s a sort of insanity or very nearly that. Of course jewelry is different from napkins, but Miss Harrison has taken so much more than she can use——”
“Especially so many pearl pins,” put in Betty, eagerly. “Haven’t you noticed what a lot of those have been lost? She couldn’t possibly wear them all.”
“Perhaps she meant to sell them,” suggested Eleanor.
“But her family are very wealthy,” objected Jean. “They spend their summers where Kate does, and she says that they give this girl everything she wants. She never took money either, even when it was lying out in plain sight, and her being so ready to give back the things seems to show that she didn’t take them for any special purpose.”