“Yes, evidently,” Richards addressed Frank Latimer. “I gave Miss Polly my check for her bonds before going to your brokerage office where I sold the bonds to you and put up the cash to cover my margins with you.” Before the stockbroker could answer him, Richards looked at Polly searchingly. “Tell us, Miss Polly, how you contrived to steal the jewelry out of Judith’s bedroom last night when she and I were sitting in the boudoir—the only entrance to the inner room?”
The girl was slow in answering. “After Judith left me last night, I was desperate,” she admitted finally. “I feared the locket would be used to entangle me in the murder, if not convict me of the crime, and I decided to steal it at all costs. I took all your jewelry—which, by the way, has been mailed back to you registered post, Judith—thinking that the theft would then be attributed to an ordinary sneak thief. As to how I passed you unobserved in entering your bedroom”—for the first time Polly smiled—“some scientific detectives would describe it as a case of psychological invisibility, where the physical eye sees, but the brain fails to record the eye’s message, but”—again she smiled—“you and Major Richards were so absorbed in each other that you never noticed me when I slipped through the boudoir and out again.”
A rich color suffused Judith’s cheeks. “Did the locket contain your letter, Polly?” she asked. “Or was Austin’s threat an idle one? I”—with a quick proud lift of her head—“never examined the locket.”
Polly opened her hand bag to which she had clung ever since entering the library, and took out the locket. She held it up that all might see the slightly raised lettering of the word “Mizpah,” then without a word she pressed a spring and from the locket took a many folded thin sheet of note paper. She spread it open and laid it in John Hale’s hand.
“This is a letter of a foolish, indiscreet girl, longing for a little attention, a little of this world’s fun,” she said soberly. “I was caught by the dross, and it was not until I grew to know you, John, that I found pure gold.”
John Hale looked at her and then at the letter.
“Austin telephoned me from New York to meet him here on Tuesday at midnight and to say nothing to any one of his expected arrival,” he stated. “He intimated that he had an important disclosure to make about you. I left Agatha at the French Embassy, and I had just reached the corner when I saw you, Polly, dash down the steps and go up the street. I started to overtake you, then turned back. I could not make up my mind to face Austin then, for I knew I would kill him,” John’s hands clenched and unclenched spasmodically. “Finally, I returned to the Embassy for Agatha and when we walked in here I was confronted with Austin’s dead body. I imagined you had seen him, Polly, and goaded by threats had stabbed him, for I recognized the shears as ones I had seen on your desk in Robert’s den.”
John stopped speaking and looked down at the letter still clutched in his extended hand, then striding swiftly to the fireplace he threw the unread letter on the blazing wood. As it ignited and flared into a blaze, he turned with outstretched hands to Polly who had watched him in an agony of suspense.
“Polly,” he began, and his voice quivered with emotion, “will you take me, for better, for worse?”
Polly’s eyes were blinded with tears, but winking them away, she looked bravely up at him.