“Perhaps so. Do you know what Owen the milkman thought?”
She had spoken the last sentence or two with her eyes bent, fiddling with the silver waiter. Now they were raised quickly.
“Owen thought that you could clear up the mystery if you liked, Matilda. At least, that you possessed some clue to it. He told me so.”
“Owen as good as said the same to me before I left,” she replied, after a pause. “He is wrong, sir: but he must think it if he will. Is he—is he at Saltwater still?”
“For all I know to the contrary. This letter, that the servants here got at, was one you were beginning to write to Owen. Did——”
“I would rather not talk of that letter, Mr. Johnny: my private affairs concern myself only,” she interrupted—and went out of the room like a shot.
Had anyone told me that during this short visit of mine in London I should come across the solution of the mystery of that tragedy enacted at No. 7, I might have been slow to credit it. Nevertheless, it was to be so.
Have you ever noticed, in going through life, that events seem to carry a sequence in themselves almost as though they bore in their own hands the guiding thread that connects them from beginning to end? For a time this thread will seem to be lost; to lie dormant, as though it had snapped, and the course of affairs it was holding to have disappeared for good. But lo! up peeps a little end when least expected, and we catch hold of it, and soon it grows into a handful; and what we had thought lost is again full of activity and gradually works itself out. Not a single syllable, good or bad, had we heard of that calamity at Saltwater during the fourteen months which had passed since. The thread of it lay dormant. At Miss Deveen’s it began to steal up again: Matilda, and her passion, and the letter she had commenced to Thomas Owen were to the fore: and before that visit of mine came to an end, the thread had, strange to say, unwound itself.
I was a favourite of Miss Deveen’s: you may have gathered that from past papers. One day, when she was going shopping, she asked me to accompany her and not Miss Cattledon: which made that rejected lady’s face all the more like vinegar. So we set off in the carriage.