“I—I hope, sir, no harm came to her from the mesmerizing,” he said, in a sort of hushed tone.
“No; she is quite well now.”
Tom looked intensely relieved, and went on, speaking with a rough kind of earnestness and gratitude:
“You’ve been wonderful good to me after it all; you’ve given me the best you have, and treated me as if I were a gentleman instead of a gallows-bird. That was a pesky job—that business with the girl. She was a pretty little thing, but plucky as the—I beg pardon, sir; but she was the most spirited little woman I ever set eyes on; and many a time it has given me the shivers, on waking up in the night, to think of her lying there, growing so pale and weak, dying by inches.”
“It was a cruel thing to do,” Earle said, with a far-away look and a very pale face.
He, too, often remembered that waxen face, with its great mournful eyes, in the still hours of the night; but that now was not the saddest of his troubles.
“You are right, sir,” Tom went on, with a strange mixture of humility and defiance; “but I had three or four fat jobs on hand just at that time, and I knew that if John Loker’s confession got abroad, there’d be no more work for me in the United States. I was going to crack a safe that very night, and had all my tools about me; so, as soon as you took the young lady off, I set to work, picked the locks, and we took to our heels with all the speed we had. You hadn’t made much noise about the affair, so when madam and I walked out of the private entrance together, no one suspected us, and we got off scot-free. I knew it wouldn’t be safe for me to be seen around there after that, so I made for a steamer that was just ready to start out, and came over here to try my luck, never dreaming I’d fall into your clutches a second time.”
“Have you been at this kind of thing long?” Earle asked.
“Nigh on to twenty years. I got in with a gang when I was a youngster, learned all the tricks of the trade, and have lived by my wits and a burglar’s kit ever since.”
“Have you, as a rule, found it a very satisfactory kind of business?” his listener asked, pointedly.