Your letter never went."
"What then became of it?"
"Goodness knows! Master Miles--"
"Do you mean HE took it?" I gasped.
She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. "I mean that I saw yesterday,
when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where you had put it.
Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he declared
that he had neither noticed nor touched it." We could only exchange, on this,
one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose who first brought
up the plumb with an almost elated "You see!"
"Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
and destroyed it."
"And don't you see anything else?"
I faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this
time your eyes are open even wider than mine."
They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show it.
"I make out now what he must have done at school." And she gave,
in her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. "He stole!"
I turned it over--I tried to be more judicial. "Well--perhaps."
She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm.
"He stole LETTERS!"
She couldn't know my reasons for a calmness after all
pretty shallow; so I showed them off as I might.
"I hope then it was to more purpose than in this case!
The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday,"
I pursued, "will have given him so scant an advantage--
for it contained only the bare demand for an interview--
that he is already much ashamed of having gone so far
for so little, and that what he had on his mind last evening
was precisely the need of confession.
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