“I’ll look for it when I come down, if you tell me what it is,” said poor Lucy. “How late I have slept! It must have been the cold journey.”
“She has not got it,” said Captain Bird, retreating to his friend outside, and closing the door on Lucy. “Knows nothing about it. Was asleep till I awoke her.”
“Search the room, you fool,” cried the excited Edwards. “I’d never trust the word of a woman. No offence to your wife, Bird, but it is not to be trusted.”
“Rubbish!” said Captain Bird.
“Either she or you must have got it. It could not disappear without hands. The people down below have not been to our rooms, as you must know.”
“She or I—what do you mean by that?” retorted Captain Bird; and a short sharp quarrel ensued. That the captain had not touched the earring, Edwards knew full well. It was Edwards who had helped him to reach the bed the previous night: and since then Bird had been in the deep sleep of stupor. But Edwards did think the captain’s wife had. The result was that Captain Bird re-entered; and, ordering Lucy to lie still, he made as exact a search of the room as his semi-sobered faculties allowed. Lucy watched it from her bed. Amidst the general hunting and turning-over of drawers and places, she saw him pick up her gown and petticoats one by one and shake them thoroughly, but he found no signs of the earring.
From that time to this the affair had remained a mystery. There had been no one in the house that night, except the proprietor and his wife, two quiet old people who never concerned themselves with their lodgers. They protested that the street-door had been fast, and that no midnight marauder could have broken in and slipped upstairs to steal a pearl brooch (as Edwards put it) or any other article. So, failing other sources of suspicion, Edwards continued to suspect Lucy. There were moments when Bird did also: though he trusted her, in regard to it, on the whole. At any rate, Lucy was obliged to be most cautious. The quilted skirt had never been off her since, except at night: through the warm genial days of spring and the sultry heat of summer she had worn the clumsy wadded thing constantly: and the earring had never been disturbed until this afternoon.
“You see how it is, Johnny,” she said to me, with one of her long-drawn sighs.
But at that moment the grocer’s young man in the white apron came back down the walk, swinging his empty basket by the handle; and he took another good stare at us in passing.
“I mean as to the peril I should be in if you suffer the restoration of the earring to transpire,” she continued in a whisper, when he was at a safe distance. “Oh, Johnny Ludlow! do you and Mrs. Todhetley take care, for my poor sake.”