"I am not angry." I smiled to prove it.
"How can I talk to you if you act like such a child!" cried Sadie.
"Never mind my actions. Stick to his."
"You know very well that he could not have carried out several successful robberies without a lot of experience. His whole open life gives the lie to that. Have we not gone into every part of it?"
"I know I found the pearls on him," I said doggedly. "They could not very well have been planted in a locked drawer in his own safe. He did not even claim that they were."
She ignored this. "And that cryptogram," she went on, "I mean the first one. It didn't say so in so many words, but the inference was unmistakable that Miss Hamerton's pearls had been disposed of, and that part of the proceeds was waiting for the thief. How do you account for that?"
I did not try to account for it. I pooh-poohed it. "He convicted himself," I insisted. "We invited him, we begged him to explain. He could not."
"Would not, you mean."
"What's the difference?"
She favoured me with an extraordinary glance of scorn. "And you set up to understand human nature!"