“No one,” answered Nell, emphatically.
“Could it have been—the—the servant, the woman I saw in the bar?” suggested Clifford, with lowered voice.
Nell smiled sadly.
“Poor Meg? No. She has been with my uncle for fifteen years; and, you know, they say it is only lately, since I have been here, in fact,” and again she grew crimson, “that the thefts have been committed. I am ashamed to say that that night, when Mr. Lowndes had told his story, I did go into poor Meg’s room, just to—just to see if she was there. And she was fast asleep; really fast asleep, not shamming. I tried her with a lighted candle before her eyes; you see I was desperate,” she added, in apology. “And then I even went downstairs and had a look at old Nannie!”
And Nell looked deeply ashamed of the fact she was confessing.
But Clifford, who had naturally less delicacy on the subject of Nannie and Meg, secretly cherished a hope that, in some inexplicable way, one or the other of these estimable persons might get them all out of their difficulty by eventually confessing to the thefts. But he was careful to give no hint of this hope to Nell.
Clifford did not want to see George Claris, but he felt bound to do so. The innkeeper was, as he had anticipated, very surly in manner toward him; and he frustrated Clifford’s intention of opening his heart to him on the subject of Nell by abruptly disappearing from the bar almost as soon as the young man entered it.
Clifford did not see Nell again; she had entered the house at the back, and he came in by the front, and although he lingered about until it was almost dark in the hope that she would relent and come out and bid him farewell, he was obliged to return to Courtstairs and thence to town without that consolation. Nell, on the alert for the expected visitor, was not long before she discovered him. He came, only a few days after Clifford’s visit, in the guise of a mild-looking man with sandy hair and pale eyes, one of those men whose age it is difficult to guess until you perceive by a close inspection of the wrinkles under the eyes that the apparent lad is well over forty.
George Claris had no suspicion of his visitor’s profession. In spite of the rumors about the house, there were travellers staying there about five nights in the seven. But then these were usually of a humble class, whose pockets might be considered not worth the picking.
The detective himself, for such he was, called himself a commercial traveller, and professed, during the four nights he spent under the roof of the Blue Lion, to do a round of business calls in the neighboring towns, returning to the inn toward evening, now from one direction, now from another, in a perfectly unostentatious and business-like manner. On the second day he announced that he should have money to receive on the fourth, and he made this announcement in the presence of as many people as he could. Jem Stickels, who still hung about the Blue Lion with malicious eyes on Nell, two or three other fishermen and a couple of farm laborers were in the bar at the time.