'What pin? asked Miss Montressor, momentarily oblivious.
'The pin you left on the table here yesterday--how did you come by it?'
'How did I come by it--didn't Mrs. Griswold tell you?'
'She! bless you, she has not been able to speak two rational words since the doctor came yesterday.'
'Why, that is one of the great points in the case, Bess. Mr. Foster, or rather Mr. Griswold, gave me that pin a few days before we left London, and told me himself that it belonged to his wife. It went a great way in making us sure that he was Mr. Griswold, and they say it is a most important piece of conviction in case they catch the murderers.'
'Well,' said Mrs. Jenkins, shaking her head, and looking extremely puzzled, 'it is very odd; I have seen that carved head before, only there were two of them, and they were not pins, they were wrist buttons. I know the thing as well as I know my own wedding-ring; and how Mrs. Griswold ever got hold of them is strange, for my Ephraim bought those very heads--I can swear by the little speck in the edge of the cap in that one of them up-stairs now--when he was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Moffat, as a courier at Rome, for a mere nothing. He believed them to be shams, but some one who knew all about such things told him afterwards they were nothing of the sort; that they were real antiques--I suppose you know what that means, Clara? I don't, except being very old, and dug up somewhere; and the same person said that the man who sold them to my Eph must have stolen them, for they were worth ten times the price he gave for them, and he got ten times the price when he sold them afterwards to Warren.'
'Who is Warren?' said Miss Montressor.
It was on the tip of Mrs. Jenkins's tongue, when she happily remembered her husband's injunctions not to talk of him, so she simply said:
'Nobody particular; a man Eph knew in the way of business; but I cannot understand how Mrs. Griswold came by them.'
'She probably bought them,' said Miss Montressor, 'from the other man, and very likely paid him ten times as much as he paid to Eph. That's the way people who have lots of money get done. I don't see any beauty in the pin; and you must understand, Bess,' she continued, assuming a sudden air of very amusing propriety, 'that it was not as a present--at least not deliberate and intentional--I came by the pin. I just could not manage to keep my shawl on with a stupid little pin I had in it, and Mr. Foster took this one out of his scarf, and lent it to me. I never thought more of it till I found it in my shawl here at New York.'