"Who's there?" I asked.
The voice which answered was the voice of Eliza.
"If you please, sir, there's been robbers in the house!"
"Robbers! Don't talk such nonsense!"
"If you please, sir, it ain't nonsense. Mrs. Perkins says there have!"
And what Mrs. Perkins said was true. There had been robbers in the house; or, at any rate, a robber; a midnight felon; a rifler of the homes of honest men. He had made his entry by way of the back kitchen window. He had had his supper in the front kitchen. A hearty meal it must have been. There were the remains of the feast still on the board. He seemed to have eaten all that there was worth eating. He had drunk all that there was worth drinking. He had certainly taken away with him on his departure all that there was worth taking. He had stripped the house of all its valuables. True, they were not many; but they were our all. And they were gone.
I imagine that few burglaries have been better carried through. He was a conscientious and observant workman of his kind. The ruthless villain! I hope one day to lay hands upon him somewhere. The county constabulary, I am certain, never will.
As for the burglar alarm--the burglar alarm was arranged in a neat heap in a corner of the hall. It had not fulfilled the purpose it had been intended to fulfil. Like Macgregor and Simon, his mother, the burglar had misunderstood the intentions which had actuated our bosoms, Leila's and mine, when we had placed it there. He cannot have read the paragraph we had noticed in the paper.
I suspect that that burglar must have been, in his way--his own way--a humorist. He had seen those newspapers apparently; and, if you reflect, it was not strange: he had wondered what they meant by being there. Possibly he had supposed that they had been placed there to save the oilcloth and the carpets from being stepped upon. Anyhow, being certain that at any rate his boots were clean, and that he stepped lightly, he picked up the newspapers carefully one by one, folded them neatly into four, and placed them, as I have said, in a little heap in a corner of the hall.