When Andrew Garrett moved away Roy's first impulse was to follow him and compel a confession. Suddenly the thought came to him that perhaps he had blundered. Under the new and annoying impression he stood motionless until Garrett had disappeared along the winding walk. Once more, as his anger left him, he sat down and, head in hands, meditated on the ugly position in which he found himself, made worse than before if he had blundered.
He began now to have doubts regarding the identity of the thief. Was it not just possible that some other person possessed a blue sweater as well as his cousin? Could he have been mistaken, after all? The window from which he saw the thief was a hundred yards away. Could he, after all, positively identify a person at that distance at night? Was he not too much excited after the successful Richelieu
performance to be in a condition to be certain? He had taken only a casual glance at the figure, and it was more than twenty-four hours afterward that he had remembered the boy wore the fatal blue sweater, which he now began to realize was the one and only means of identifying his cousin. Garrett must have some good grounds for his steady and persistent denials; yet that he should deny was not surprising to Roy for he knew his cousin fairly well.
The young man would have remained long in his unpleasant and disturbing meditations had he not heard some one approaching, and singing some ridiculous parody which had recently “caught” the yard, having been cleverly introduced into a recent debate on the relative importance of the Hibernians and the Anglo-Saxons in this country. It ran:
“There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin,
The dew on his thin robe was beany and chill—
Ere the ship that had brought him had passed out of hearin',
He was Alderman Mike, introducing a bill.”
It was Jack Beecham's happy voice, and his merry laugh echoed through the trees. At that moment, as he turned a bend in the walk, he caught sight of Roy.
“Shame on the false Etruscan who lingers in his home,” he shouted. “Come on, Roy; Tom Shealey and myself are going for a good long tramp in the woods. Why, man, you look as doleful as a November day. What's up? Come on; a good walk will drive the blues away.”
The two friends took Henning for a good long tramp, which is the most satisfactory curative process for driving away depression of spirits, settling one's nerves, and banishing ill-temper.