Armorel, for her part, when she returned to her own room, compared the first series of poems, as she had compared the second, with the manuscript book. And the first series, too, word for word, was the same as the earlier poems in the book.
'Good heavens!' cried Armorel. 'The man steals his verses, as he steals his pictures! Poor Effie! She is as bad as Roland!'
This was Thought the First. One has already seen how the three Thoughts treated her before. This time it was just the same. Thought the Second came next, and began to argue. A very capable logician is Thought the Second, once distinguished for what Oxford men call Science. If, said Thought the Second, the manuscript and the volumes agree, it seems to show that Effie has copied the latter into her own book, and now tries to pass the poems off as her own. Such things have been done. If this was the case—and why not?—Effie would be, indeed, a girl full of deceit and desperately wicked. But then, how came Effie to have in her volume a poem hitherto unpublished, which was lying on Mr. Feilding's table? Yet, surely, it was quite as probable that the girl should deceive her as that the man should deceive the world.
Next. Thought the Third. This sage remarked calmly, 'The man is full of villany. He has deceived the world in the matter of the pictures. Why not also in the matter of the poems? But let us consider the character of the verses. Take internal evidence.' Then Armorel read the whole series right through in the two little printed volumes. Oh! They were feminine. Only a woman could write these lines. Womanhood breathed in every one. Now that the key was supplied, she understood. She recognised the voice, eager, passionate, of her friend.
'They are all Effie's!' she cried again; 'all—all. The man has stolen his verses as well as his pictures.'
This discovery, when she had quite made up her mind that it was as true as the former, entirely fell in with all that Effie had told her concerning herself. She had sold her poems all to one editor—he was the only editor who would ever take them—and now she was afraid that he would take no more. Why?—why?—because—oh, now she understood all—because he wanted to be a dramatist in the same way that he was a painter and a poet, and neither Archie nor his sister would consent! 'Yes,' she said, 'he is, indeed, the cleverest man in London.'
Before she went to bed that night she had devised a little plan—quite an ingenious clever little plan. You shall hear what it was, and how it came off.