The officer at length came, and was introduced. Lady Sarah joined them, and she proceeded to give him the outline of the case. A valuable diamond bracelet, recently presented to Lady Sarah by her husband, had disappeared in a singular manner. Miss Seaton Dalrymple, the companion to Lady Sarah, had temporary charge of the jewel-box. She had brought it down the previous evening, Thursday, this being Friday, to the back drawing-room, and laid several pairs of bracelets out on a table, ready for Lady Sarah, who was going to the opera, to choose which she would wear when she came up from dinner. Lady Sarah chose a pair, and put, herself, the rest back into the box, which Miss Seaton then locked, and carried to its place upstairs. In the few minutes that the bracelets lay on the table, the most valuable one of all, a diamond, disappeared from it. "I did not want this to be officially investigated; at least, not so quickly," observed Lady Sarah to the officer. "The colonel wrote for you quite against my wish." "And so have let the thief get clear off, and put up with the loss!" cried the colonel. "Very fine, my lady." "You see," added her ladyship, explaining to the officer, "Miss Dalrymple is a young lady of extremely good family, with whom we are intimate. She is of feeble constitution, and this affair has so completely upset her, that I fear she will be laid on a sick bed." "It won't be my fault, if she is," retorted the colonel, taking the implied reproach to himself. "She'd be as glad to find it out as ourselves. The loss of a diamond bracelet, worth two or three hundred guineas, is not to be hushed up. They are not to be bought every day, Lady Sarah." The officer was taken to the back drawing-room, whence the bracelet disappeared. It presented nothing peculiar. The folding-doors between it and the front-room stood open, the back window, a large one, looked out upon some flat leads. He seemed to take in the points of the double room at a glance: he examined the latches of the two doors opening to the corridor, he looked next from the front windows and then from the one at the back. From the front ones ordinary ingress was impossible; it was nearly as much so from the back one. The officer leaned out for some time, but could make nothing of a case; The window was shut in by a balcony that just encircled it, and was not accessible from the leads underneath. The house was one of a row, or terrace, of houses, and they all bore the same features: the leads running along below; the confining balconies to the windows on this floor above. But the windows could not be gained from the leads except by means of a ladder; and the balconies were not at all near each other. "Nothing to be suspected there," concluded the officer, bringing in his head and shoulders. "I should like, if you please, ma'am, to see Miss Dalrymple."