“Have you been playing a trick on me, Adelaide?” Winnie asked. “Did you manage to slip it out while we were not looking?”
Adelaide disclaimed any such action, and Milly and I confirmed her assertion, for we had been watching the door all the time.
Winnie wheeled the cabinet away from the wall, almost expecting to find a concealed door opening into Cynthia’s room. But the wall was perfectly solid, there was not even a mouse hole in the base-board, while the back of the cabinet was not a sliding panel. We banged it, and pushed it, and examined it with a magnifying glass for concealed springs or hinges. It was simply an honest piece of work, a secure, heavy back, conspicuously fastened in its place with wooden pegs, a construction to which cabinet makers give the term dowelling, and to make assurance doubly sure, the edges had been glued with a cement which had turned black with age, but had not cracked. There was no possible way in which the cabinet could have been opened from behind.
“There goes my pet theory,” said Winnie, in an aggrieved tone. “It would have been just like Cynthia to have removed things from the back of the cabinet, if we could only have discovered a concealed door in the partition behind it. You see the cabinet backs so conveniently against her room.”
But there was no possibility of any door having ever existed here. The partition wall was not of boards, which might have been sawed through and removed. It was clean white plaster which had never been papered, and would have betrayed the least scratch, and Winnie was obliged to relinquish this romantic method of access to the cabinet.
“I shall always think,” said Adelaide, “that the first robbery was committed by that individual we saw through the studio transom in Professor Waite’s great Rembrandt hat.”
Winnie laughed heartily. “Girls, I may as well confess,” she exclaimed, “that was your humble servant.”
“You, Winnie?”
“Yes, I, Winnie. Don’t you remember that I was not in the parlor when the head appeared? I was in the studio, and it struck me that it would be rather a good joke to pretend to be Professor Waite, tramping up and down before that door, tormented by a consuming passion for Adelaide. Wait, I will put the hat on again and let you see.” Winnie dashed into the studio and returned wearing the Rembrandt hat, and we all laughed at her cavalier appearance.
“But, girls,” she exclaimed, throwing the hat on the floor, “this is really no laughing matter. Do you realize that my essay is gone? My essay that I am to read next week. And how I am ever to find time to write it over again, with examinations and all that I have to do between now and then, is more than I know. Just see how wickedly Giovanni de’ Medici leers at me!” and Winnie pointed to the carved head which adorned the centre of the cabinet door. “Oh! what shall I do? what shall I do?”