"I tried to stop her, but she had gone like a flash. But why do you talk about her escaping and of catching her. She isn't a criminal fleeing from justice, is she?"
"But that is just what she is?" cried Hilary triumphantly. "Oh, you have all been finely taken in by her; but I suspected her from the first, and to-night, I have proved her to be a thief and a burglar. I, alone and unaided, have brought her to justice."
"Miss Carson a thief and a burglar!" cried Geoffrey when his astonishment would allow him to speak. "What mad idea have you got into your head now, Hilary?"
Hilary would dearly have liked to have told the long history of the growth of her suspicions about Miss Carson from the very beginning, but knowing that she could not expect the same patient attention from her brothers and sister as her mother had given her, she came straight to the point at once. After all, she was not sure that it was not the most dramatic way of telling her tale.
"I have got no mad idea as you call it, Geoffrey, in my head at all," she said with dignity. "I have merely found out who the Seabourne burglars are, that's all. At least, I have put my hand on one of them, and that one is Miss Carson. This afternoon, locked up in her trunk in the dressing-room upstairs, I found all Colonel Baker's plate and other valuable things."
"Rot!" exclaimed Geoffrey incredulously.
"It isn't rot at all," said Hilary nonchalantly; "it's the truth. But when I taxed her with the crime she denied it."
"Well, of course she did," said Geoffrey. "Of all the nonsense I ever heard this is about the greatest."
Hilary shrugged her shoulders. "Call it nonsense if you like," she said, "but there are the things themselves, every one of them, even to the Indian tablecloth she carried them off in, upstairs in her box at this moment. Go and see them for yourselves if you don't believe me. And if she didn't put them there, who did? Pray tell me that."
Noel looked at Jack, and Jack looked back at Noel. Then they sighed. The moment for confession had undoubtedly arrived, and they both took a step forward.