I put down the application, and took the anonymous letter about the bag from my pocketbook. “Read this, Sperry,” I said. “You know the letter. Mrs. Dane read it to us Saturday night. But compare the writing.”
He compared the two, with a slight lifting of his eyebrows. Then he put them down. “Hawkins!” he said. “Hawkins has the letters! And the bag!”
“Exactly,” I commented dryly. “In other words, Hawkins was in Miss Jeremy’s house when, at the second sitting, she told of the letters.”
I felt rather sorry for Sperry. He paced the room wretchedly, the two letters in his hand.
“But why should he tell her, if he did?” he demanded. “The writer of that anonymous letter was writing for only one person. Every effort is made to conceal his identity.”
I felt that he was right. The point was well taken.
“The question now is, to whom was it written?” We pondered that, to no effect. That Hawkins had certain letters which touched on the Wells affair, that they were probably in his possession in the Connell house, was clear enough. But we had no possible authority for trying to get the letters, although Sperry was anxious to make the attempt.
“Although I feel,” he said, “that it is too late to help her very much. She is innocent; I know that. I think you know that, too, deep in that legal mind of yours. It is wrong to discredit her because I did a foolish thing.” He warmed to his argument. “Why, think, man,” he said. “The whole first sitting was practically coincident with the crime itself.”
It was true enough. Whatever suspicion might be cast on the second seance, the first at least remained inexplicable, by any laws we recognized. In a way, I felt sorry for Sperry. Here he was, on the first day of his engagement, protesting her honesty, her complete ignorance of the revelations she had made and his intention to keep her in ignorance, and yet betraying his own anxiety and possible doubt in the same breath.
“She did not even know there was a family named Wells. When I said that Hawkins had been employed by the Wells, it meant nothing to her. I was watching.”