There's a little hill part way along the Lane where the road slopes down toward the entrance of Mapleshade. We stopped here and looked back at the house lying long and dark among its dark trees. The sky was bright with stars and by their light you could see the black patches of the woods and here and there a paler stretch where the land was bare and open. It was all shadowy and gloomy except where the windows shone out in bright orange squares. I pointed out to Babbitts where Sylvia's windows were, not a light in them; and then, at the end of the wing, four or five in a row that belonged to Mrs. Fowler's suite. Her sitting-room was one of them where Anne had told me she and the Doctor always sat in the evenings.
"They're there now," I said. "What do you suppose they're doing?"
"Search me," said Babbitts, "I can't answer for another man, but if I was in the Doctor's shoes I'd be pacing up and down, with my Circassian Beauty hair turning white while you waited."
"Yes," I said, nodding. "I'll bet that's what he's doing. I can see them, surrounded by their riches, jumping every time there's a knock on the door, thinking that the summons has come."
And that shows you how you never can tell. For at that hour in that room the Doctor and Mrs. Fowler were talking to Walter Mills, who had just come from Philadelphia, bringing them the first ray of hope they'd had since the tragedy. It was in the form of a diamond and ruby lavalliere that he had found the day before in a pawn shop and that Mrs. Fowler had identified as Sylvia's.
Four days later a piece of news ran like wildfire through Longwood: Virginie Dupont had been arrested and brought to Bloomington.
They put her in jail there and it didn't take any third degree to get the truth out of her. She made a clean breast of it, for she was caught with the goods, all the lost jewelry being found in the place where she was hiding. It sent her to the penitentiary, and her lover, too, for whom—anyway she said so—she had robbed Sylvia's Hesketh's room on the night that Sylvia Hesketh disappeared.
If her story threw no light on the murder it exonerated the Doctor, for it fitted at every point with what he had said.
I'll write it down here, not in her words, but as I got it from the papers.
For some time she had been planning to rob Sylvia, but was waiting for a good opportunity. This came, when the Doctor, being out of the house, she discovered that an elopement was on foot. She had read Sylvia's letters, which were thrown carelessly about, and knew of the affair with Jack Reddy, and when on Sunday morning she was sent to the village to get a letter from Reddy she guessed what it was. Before giving it to Sylvia she went to her own room, opened the envelope with steam from a kettle, and read it. Then she knew that her chance had come.