“Why, you see, Captain Barclay Rivers _had_ written a letter to his wife, telling her that he was forwarding the bale of skins, and mentioning a secret connected with one of them; and that letter Lightfoot had stolen amongst others. But, before he could formulate any plan for acting upon the information contained in it, he was trapped and arrested on another charge and sent to prison, only to find upon his release that the lady had been made a widow, and the bale sold and its contents scattered during his confinement. Hence his advertisement, and, generally, his determined efforts to trace the several items of the parcel; hence, moreover, his subornation and ruin of the unhappy girl at Mélanies’, whom he had known and courted when he was a postman and she a maid at Mrs Rivers’s, and whom he had, since his release, tracked to the shop in the Borough, and won to his nefarious purposes.” “And you saw through it all in that single instant?” “I will not go so far. But I had at least a vision of the truth. Still there remained to discover the nature of the secret, and the whereabouts of the lost skin--for by now I was convinced that the rose-ring, and the rose-ring alone, the one specimen of its kind which, it would seem, the parcel contained, held the solution of the mystery. Well, I discovered it; but at a fatal moment for one poor creature.” “O, don’t stop!” “I must hurry rather. There is much ground to cover in a few words. You will take for granted, Miss Halifax, the tedious process of inquiry they represent. In brief, I questioned Mrs Rivers as to her former ménage, and learned that in the time of Annie Milner there had been but one other servant in the house, namely a cook, Bessie Cotton by name. It was just possible that _she_ might know something about the lost rose-ring. “I traced this girl to the situation she had procured through her former mistress, from that situation to another; finally, to small lodgings she was occupying in the neighbourhood of Newington Butts. I found her at home, and opened upon her at once on the subject of the rose-ring. To my amazement she broke into a passion of tears and half coherent protestations, denouncing, as I understood, her former fellow-servant Annie Milner for having brought the law on her--as she supposed, in my person. It was long before I could convince her that I was not a plain-clothes constable, long before I could quiet and reassure her; but I succeeded at length, and persuaded her little by little to make a full confession to me of the truth. And what do you think it was?” “It was she who had stolen the rose-ring?” “It was she--a mere impulsive misdemeanour--a mere sin of vanity, committed for the purpose of adorning a cherished hat--which hat still survived so adorned. Seeing the parcel of bright skins so little regarded she had succumbed one day to the temptation of the rose-ring, attracted by its eyes and its singularity, and had appropriated it to herself.