But Mrs. Dibble would agitate herself; Mrs. Dibble would not be calm; Mrs. Dibble would insist upon moaning and crying and rocking herself to and fro, and bursting her hooks-and-eyes, and undoing her cap-strings and letting her curls come down. Mrs. Dibble was, indeed, most perverse.
“The money has been restored to its owner, and Dibble will, no doubt, get off with a month or two,” said the detective.
“Get off with a month or two, thir; what do you mean? A month or two of what?”
“Imprisonment, of course,” said Bales.
“O dear! O dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Dibble, the tears really coming into her eyes now, and her cap-strings too, blinding her with pink ribbon and “round saline globules,” as that smart reporter friend of ours would say,—“What will become of me! I shall descend with grey hairs to the grave! and to think that I wath once at a boarding-school, the envy of them all, and the daughter of a gentleman, thir; yeth, a gentleman, though I thay it. O dear! O dear! Thomath, Thomath, what have you done!”
“I have told you what Thomas has done,” said Bales, in his calm, imperturbable way; “and now I will tell you the good news I have for you, if you will only be quiet. The Right Honourable the Countess of Verner sends you this,—it is a fifty-pound note; and she requests you to pack up your things and come down to Montem Castle with me.”
Mrs. Dibble glanced at the note and listened to the detective’s words, but continued to moan and cry. She did not know what else to do; for she was not quite sure that Bales was not deceiving her.
“The lady, it appears, was once in your house: she is Lieutenant Somerton’s sister: if I told you that much, she said, you would understand.”
“Lieutenant Thomerton! O yeth, yeth,” said Mrs. Dibble, seizing the note; “I understand.”
“It seems so,” said Bales.