“What girl?”
“The one you saw—my ‘double’—Maud Smith, as she calls herself, a well-known thief.”
Gerard sat back and looked at her incredulously. Then he bent forward again, and looking earnestly, entreatingly into her face, asked—
“Do you mean to tell me that the girl I saw that night was not you?”
“I can answer for that,” she said. “What should I be doing in a crowd at that time of night—and picking pockets?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that!”
“Didn’t you? I think you implied it, though. You saw this girl pass jewelry to another person. And then you saw no more of them. Is any other explanation possible than that they were a couple of thieves?”
It seemed to him callous, horrible, for her to put his unspoken dread into simple, straightforward speech. He shrank before her as she did so.
“I—I thought perhaps I was mistaken, and that—”
“But you were not,” she interrupted sharply. “It is the bane of my life, that this girl, who is, I am sorry to say, a relation of mine—”