Bet felt somewhat better after the optimistic talk with Chief Baldwin and for that night, at least, she laid aside her worries.
But Phil was not at all reassured by Chief Baldwin's promise. He was unhappy and despondent as he told his mother the whole story from beginning to end.
"I'm terribly uncomfortable, because I was the last to handle it, Mother," confided the boy. "Would anyone have imagined that such a thing could happen?"
"Are you sure you did return it? Perhaps it is in the pocket of your overcoat. I'm going to see," and his mother left the room.
But Phil knew the fan was not there. And that night he was disturbed even in his dreams and woke at intervals with the feeling that all the troubles of the universe weighed him down.
The next morning he was again with Chief Baldwin and Amos Longworth, the detective, a tight-lipped stranger with narrow eyes, who had been chosen to look into the matter. Together they went to the Manor and looked over the rooms as before. Longworth examined the footprints in the dust and in the snow outside. "That's some foot! I should think you'd be able to trace a man by that foot. It's a whale!"
"And that's why we thought it was someone masquerading. No one in our crowd has a foot that size."
But if Phil was nervous and depressed over what had happened up to this time, he had reason to be still more concerned when the detective accompanied him home and began to question him privately. Before an hour had passed, Longworth had made him confess that he and his mother were very poor and that he might have to leave school to work. Also that he realized the fan was very valuable.
"Yes, I knew the fan was worth a lot of money. Colonel Baxter told us so. It's painted by a famous French artist and was at one time the property of Marie Antoinette. It was given to her by Louis XV. That's enough to make it very valuable."
"You know all about it, I see. So you put it in your pocket?"