We didn’t learn all about it till next day. The first story that went about when people got up in the morning was that Mrs. Phillips had been murdered in her bed, but, thank goodness, it wasn’t as bad as that; but the nurse that slept in the next room to her, got a nasty knock on the head, hearing a noise and coming in, which made her so queer that she was a long time before she could say what the man was like she saw in the room, ransacking the things.
But what gave us the most dreadful shock first of all, was the disappearance of the London physician, and him going out in the middle of the night and leaving our front door open.
Directly we told the policeman, he said, “He’s the man.”
“What man?” I said.
“Why, the man that committed the burglary.”
I couldn’t believe that. I said it was nonsense. A London physician wouldn’t go breaking into people’s houses at night. But he certainly was gone, and his hand portmanteau too, and he didn’t come back again the next morning, and then we recollected about his going up to the Hall with Mr. Wilkins, and his having seen the grounds and been shown over the house by the butler.
But it was such a dreadful idea that it was a very long time before I could believe it, and I didn’t quite till the detective came down from London and began to ask questions.
We’d never asked the physician his name, and no letters had come for him, which he explained by saying, that as he wanted to be quite quiet and rest, he had ordered no letters to be forwarded, only he was to be telegraphed to in case of anything very particular, and of course we should have taken up any telegram that came, and said, “Is this for you, sir?” because there was nobody else staying in the house. His going away like that and not coming back again, wasn’t what a first-class London physician would have done, so it was evident he’d deceived us about himself, and if he’d done that, why shouldn’t he be the burglar?
The detective said it was a “put-up job”—that’s what he called it. He said the Hall had been “marked,” and this fellow had come to stay at our house so as to take his observations and find out all he could, and “do the trick” (those were the detective’s words) as soon as he saw a good opportunity.
Poor Mr. Wilkins was nearly mad to think that he’d been the one to take him over the grounds and introduce him to the butler, and so let him find out all he wanted to, and you may be sure that we were pretty mad, too, that the burglar who burgled the Hall should have been a visitor staying at our house. Our first visitor, too, and one we’d been so proud of, and thought was going to do us such a lot of good!