“The letter I sent to you was addressed to Miss Roberta Vandergrift,” he said, “and, since you have replied in person, am I not justified in believing that to be your real name?”
Bobs flushed. “I’ll have to acknowledge that it is,” she said, “but the other day when you asked me my name, I didn’t quite like to give that of our family and so, at random, I chose one.” Then the girl smiled frankly at him. “I couldn’t have chosen a worse one, it seems. Miss Dolittle did not impress my late employer as being a good name for a clerk.”
“You are wrong there,” the young man told her, and at last there was no mistaking the fact that he was amused. “Mr. Queerwitz decided that you did too much and not too little. I don’t know when I have been so pleased as I was over the fact, which so disturbs him, that you were able to drive the better bargain. Mr. Queerwitz has excelled in that line, and to have a mere slip of a girl obtain one thousand dollars for a book, the mate of which brought him but five hundred dollars, is humiliating to say the least.”
Then, leaning forward, the young man said, with evident interest: “Miss Vandergrift, will you tell me what happened?”
Roberta’s expression was sphynx-like. “I understand, Mr. Jewett,” she replied, “that one need not give incriminating evidence against oneself.”
Then her eyes twinkled. “And what is more,” she told him, “I don’t believe that it is necessary. This office seems to have ferreted out the facts.”
“You are right,” the young man confessed, “and now I will tell you just what happened. It seems that while you were out for lunch Mr. Queerwitz, or one of his assistants, discovered that the rare book was missing. He phoned me at once and reported that his head clerk believed that you had taken the book. She had found you so absorbed in it earlier in the day that you had not even been conscious of her presence.
“I assured Mr. Queerwitz that I believed he was on the wrong trail, but he insisted that a detective be sent to watch your actions. This was done, and that night the report delivered to this office was that you had visited an old second-hand book shop on Third Avenue; that from there you had mailed one book, and had then taken another to Mr. Van Loon, sold it, and had delivered the money to the old bookseller.
“Our natural conclusion was that the stolen book was the one that you had sold, but when Mr. Van Loon was reached by telephone, he stated that the first of the volumes was the one that he had purchased for one thousand dollars.
“We said nothing of all this to Mr. Queerwitz, as we wished to see if the book that you had mailed was the one that had been taken from the antique shop.