At last she caught Gerard’s eye, and he saw her falter and turn pale as she handled, with a connoisseur’s fingers, a beautiful shawl of modern point lace.
He wondered whether she was going to cut him; but she did not. She was evidently confused at the sight of him, but she recovered herself, shook hands, and then, asking him to get her a packet of postcards, and to meet her outside with them, dismissed him on what he saw to be an errand invented to get rid of him.
He was disturbed, perplexed, but that was no new experience where Miss Davison was concerned. He went obediently to do her bidding, hoping for a few minutes’ talk to compensate him for his docility.
But as he went back towards the department where he had left her, he met one of the employés hurrying out, saying excitedly under his breath to another—
“Tell the commissionaire to go for a policeman. We’ve got hold of our swell shop-lifter at last.”
CHAPTER VII
Gerard felt sick with alarm. A shop-lifter! Although he was ashamed of his own fears, they overpowered him.
He asked himself what right he had to connect the arrest of a well-known shop-lifter with the presence of Miss Davison in that particular department of the stores where the theft appeared to have been detected. But even as he did so, and tried to think that he ought to be ashamed of his suspicions, he knew very well that they were justified; that the episode of the sparkling ornament passed by Miss Davison (or her “double”) to the man in the crowd on the night of the fête at Lord Chislehurst’s suggested inevitably that she was the person who was now to be arrested for theft.
The thought was horrible. Even though, in this first moment of surprise and dismay, he had no doubts about her guilt, he was none the less as much distressed to think of the disgrace which awaited her as if she had been one of his own kin.
For the puzzle, the marvel of the situation was that although he could not help his strong suspicions of Miss Davison’s honesty, he knew her to be as pure-souled as it is possible for a human being to be, and the conviction which had already been forming in his mind now grew stronger that she must be a kleptomaniac, and that she stole, if indeed she did steal, not from criminal intention, but by irresistible instinct.