Mr. Stopper laughed aloud.
"Well, ma'am, that would be a roundabout way of coming by your own. I don't think we could make out a case against you if you had. Not quite. But, seriously, who came into the house after I left? I hung the keys on that wall with my own hands."
"And I saw them there when I went to bed," said Mrs. Boxall, making a general impression ground for an individual assertion.
"Then somebody must have come in after you had gone to bed—some one that knew the place. Did you find the street door had been tampered with?"
"Lucy opened it this morning."
Mrs. Boxall went to the door and called her grand-daughter. Lucy came, thinking Mr. Stopper must be gone. When she saw him there, she would have left the room again, but her grandmother interfered.
"Come here, child," she said, peremptorily. "Was the house-door open when you went down this morning?"
Lucy felt her face grow pale with the vaguest foreboding—associated with the figure which had run through the archway and her finding the door open. But she kept her self-command.
"No, grannie. The door was shut as usual."
"Did nobody call last night?" asked Mr. Stopper, who had his suspicions, and longed to have them confirmed in order to pay off old scores at once.