“That’s true. Well, what I know amounts to very little. But one day, as I was walking in the garden close to that end of the house that’s shut up—”
“Where the windows open down to the ground?” asked Bayre.
“The room next to that one it was, the very last room of all, where there are two windows barred on the outside and shuttered on the inside. You may not have noticed them, for there’s a creeper which has been neglected, a Virginia creeper, on that corner of the house; and the long dead branches hang like great bunches of string down over the windows.”
Bayre remembered the ragged Virginia creeper, though he had failed to notice the iron bars behind them, or the fact that these two windows were shuttered like those of the longer room beyond.
“Well?” said he.
“It was late one afternoon,” she went on, “that I saw the shutters of one of these windows put back and a hand thrust out to open the window. I was startled, and I must have made some sound, for I saw that the hand was a woman’s, and that the fingers were loaded with rings. It was drawn back instantly, and I heard a sort of tussle going on inside the room, and voices speaking low and hurriedly. And presently someone came to the window and looked out: but it was not the woman; it was your uncle. He looked down at me angrily, shut the window and closed the shutters.”
“You asked him about it, of course?”
“I shouldn’t have dared. But he told me, of his own accord, that he had caught one of the maids decking herself out in some jewellery which he kept in a locked-up room.”
“And may not that have been the truth?”
“I don’t think so. There are only three women about the house at any time: Marie Vazon, who is the only one who might dare such a thing, lives at her father’s, and is not very much at the big house at all. The other two are an old woman and her niece, neither of whom dares to stay a minute longer out of the servants’ quarters than she can help. And all three women have hands which are large and red, and the fingers of which could not wear rings of ordinary size. Well, such rings as I saw—valuable as they must have been if they were real—are not made in extraordinary sizes!”