“It would account for the affair, if she were? I mean, that idea fits with what you remember, does it?”
“Of course it does! I ought to have thought of it for myself, at once. But I never knew anyone who walked in their sleep. It’s always been outside my experience, and I rather disbelieved most of the tales I’ve heard about it. So it didn’t suggest itself to me until you mentioned the candle in my hand. Of course, then I saw at once that she couldn’t help seeing me if she had been awake.”
“Suppose we assume she’s a somnambulist. She doesn’t know she walks in her sleep. That’s evident. For if she knows she’s subject to it, she’d have seen the explanation for herself at once; whereas she was just as puzzled as you were over the thing. Now doesn’t that suggest something further to you?”
Eileen knitted her brows for a moment or two before she saw his meaning.
“The Talisman?” she asked finally.
“Yes. Suppose she took it away that night. She may have concealed it somewhere and clean forgotten—or never known, rather—that she had ever touched it.”
The girl’s face showed her surprise at this suggestion.
“Do you know, that’s wonderfully clever! I really believe you’ve come very near the mark. And wouldn’t it be a relief if it turned out to be true? There’d be no thief after all.”
“If some of them turned out to be thieves, I don’t know that it would lower them much in my opinion now,” Westenhanger observed, elliptically.
Eileen avoided a direct reply.