"No, that beats me," he admitted.
"And I wouldn't be too virtuous about it, Monty. In any case you'd no business with the thing, you know."
"Oh, stuff!" he scoffed. "It's you that's being virtuous."
And, with that ring in my waistcoat pocket that I had picked up with no more justification than he had the pistol, he might have added that I was hypocritical too.
VI
To tell the truth, that ring was beginning to worry me a little. I don't mean my possession of it, since I had no intention of pawning it, and was prepared to hand it over to its rightful owner as soon as I felt that that course would not do more harm than good. My concern was about the severed relation of which it had been a symbol. I wondered whether I was not perhaps a little excessively delicate on Monty's behalf. If my eyes, wandering round his tidy room, had encountered a copy of the Era or been given any other excuse for introducing Audrey Cunningham's name, I think that after all I should have risked it. But "When in doubt cut it out" is a safe motto, and I remained silent.
I had had, however, an idea. Mrs. Cunningham might be "fed" with men, but it was not likely that she had broken off her engagement without saying something to Mollie Esdaile about it. What was the harm in writing to Mollie, not necessarily mentioning the ring, but asking for her version of whatever had happened?
The more I thought of it the more I liked the idea. Match-making is rather out of my line, but I am not entirely indifferent to the happiness of my friends, and I had not forgotten poor Monty's anguished cry of "Dawdy! Dawdy!" the last time I had visited him in Jubilee Place. I do not call it match-making merely to inquire whether a possible obstacle may not be removed. If it was the Case's doing, the Case's solution ought to get matters right again. A little prematurely, perhaps, I was growing to the belief that the question was not whether the Case would settle itself, but how.