"You received your portfolio of sketches back safely, Mr. Conroy, I hope. My aunt left them at your address that day when we went out for our drive."
"Did you indeed leave them? Were you so good?"
"Sketches such as those are too valuable to be trusted to the chance of loss," said Ella.
"I was so very sorry not to call again on Mrs. Carlyon, as I had promised," he continued, "but the next day but one I had to leave town. I wonder what she thought of me?"
"I don't think she thought at all," replied Ella, ingenuously--"though she would, I am sure, have been glad to see you. Aunt Gertrude was too full of her loss in those days to notice who visited her. On the evening of the party she lost her jewels."
"Lost her jewels!" exclaimed Conroy. "Do you mean those she wore?"
"No, no. Her casket of jewels was stolen from her dressing-room. Some of them were very valuable. The case was left on her dressing-table, and it disappeared during the evening."
"Was the case itself stolen?"
"We thought so that night, but the next morning, when the housemaids were sweeping her boudoir--the room in which we looked at your sketches, if you remember--they found the case on the floor, ingeniously hidden behind the window-curtain."
"Empty?"