“Yes; but that was before it all came out in the newspapers,” Jarvis cut in glibly. “He doesn’t mind your talking about it now; in fact, he told me to ask you.” For something better than a week the reporter had been assiduously cultivating Mrs. Seeley’s housemaid, and one of the results of the intimacy was a second visit to Brant’s room, made in the landlady’s absence and connived at and arranged by Mary McCarthy. Jarvis hoped little from a second inspection of the room, and not much from anything the housemaid could tell. Yet he lied brazenly to make her talk, and the lie accomplished that whereunto it was sent. “Ah, then, did he tell you that, poor man?” said the unsuspecting Mary. “He did, for a fact; couldn’t come himself, you know, poor fellow!” rejoined the reporter, clinching the falsehood promptly. “Now show me just what you did and tell me what you saw.” Thus absolved and adjured, Mary McCarthy went circumstantially over the account of her discovery of the burglar, Jarvis absorbing the story as it was told, and leaving the journalistic compartment of his brain to sift the salient facts from the mass of embellishment and exaggeration. “Black clothes, you say?” he interrupted, when the housemaid came to the describing of the intruder. “Black as Father Callahan’s cassock.” “Then he didn’t look like a tramp or a tough?” “On’y for the oogly face av him I might have mistook him for Misther Brant himself.” Jarvis strolled to the window and stood with his hands deep in his pockets, looking out upon the tin roof of the porch. “Dang the thing!” he muttered. “It gets blinder with every move. Now, who the mischief is this gentleman burglar whom Brant wants to screen, and what was he here for? By Jove! I wonder if it was young Langford? He always wears gamblers’ mourning. But what the dickens was he trying to steal?” He turned away from the window and made another slow circuit of the room in the vague hope that he might stumble upon some overlooked clew to the puzzle. There was none, and he was about to give it up when he came to the closet at the foot of the bed. “Does this door open into the next room?” he asked. “No, sure; ’tis on’y the closet where Misther Brant does be keeping his clothes.” Jarvis turned the knob and glanced at the garments hanging in an orderly row at the back of the shallow recess. “These are all Brant’s, I suppose,” he said carelessly. “’Deed and they are, then. Whose else would they be?” “Are these all he has?” Mary McCarthy picked a fancied suspicion out of the meaningless question and promptly resented it. “D’ye think annybody would be shtealing them?” she demanded. “Av coorse they are all there, barring fwhat Misther Antrim and the b’y tuk to him at the jail.” “Boy? What boy was this?” “’Deed, then, I don’t know; some little scaramouch from the sthreets, I’m thinking. But he did be bringing a letther from Misther Brant; ’tis there on the table.”