The detective took Claris’s insolence very quietly. Remembering the incident of the fusee, he was able to chuckle to himself with the thought that he held the clue of which George Claris knew nothing.
“There’ll be a burn on her hand,” he thought to himself, “for many a day.”
Returning to the house by the door through which he had left it, he noticed, now in the broader daylight, that there was a large cupboard immediately opposite, under the stairs. Opening the door of this cupboard, which he found unfastened, he saw that the contents were in some disorder, and he waited about until Meg, the servant, came to it to fetch her brooms.
The woman started with a gruff exclamation at his appearance.
“There is nothing for you to be frightened about,” said he, quietly. “I only want you to tell me whether that is exactly the state in which you left the cupboard when you went to it last.”
It had needed only a very few moments for him to decide that this was not the woman of whom he was in search. Stout, broad, clumsy of movement and heavy of tread, the robust figure before him had certainly none of the nimbleness of the thief of whom he was in search. He had had experience enough to know how to assume an entirely reassuring manner with persons of her stamp, and it took her only a few minutes to recover her self-possession and to answer him intelligently.
“Why, no, it ain’t,” she said, with robust surprise and vehemence. “The things ’as been knocked down an’ trampled on, an’ all my cloths mixed up. Why do you think, sir,” she went on with round eyes, “that the thief ’isself has been in here?”
And she looked back at her brooms, her pails and her cloths with a mixture of amazement, fear and respect.
“Well, somebody’s been in there, that’s evident, isn’t it?” said he, good-humoredly.
And he decided in his own mind that the clever thief had opened and shut the back door loudly as a blind, and had secreted herself in this cupboard until he was safely out of the house.