While they had been talking, Miss Gregg and Doris had come quietly into the room. Both were a trifle paler than usual, but otherwise were unruffled. A moment later Mosely returned from his telephone colloquy with the police. “The chief says he’ll be right over,” he reported. “He asked if any other rooms had been robbed. And I felt like a fool, to have to tell him we hadn’t even looked.” “If you had waited a minute longer, before leaving the telephone,” spoke up Miss Gregg, “you could have told him that at least one more room had been ransacked. My niece and I stopped in our suite, on the way down, just now. Her little jewel case and the chamois bag I kept my rings and things in--both of them are gone.” “Miss Gregg!” exclaimed Vail. “Not really? Oh, I’m so sorry! So--” A babel of other sympathetic voices drowned his stammered condolences. Out of the babel emerged Willis Chase’s query. “Were they locked up?” “Yes, and no,” returned Miss Gregg. “We locked them in the second drawer of the dresser and hid the key. But being only normal women and not Sherlockettes, of course we quite overlooked locking the top drawer. The top drawer has been carefully taken out and laid on the bed. And the case and the chamois bag have been painlessly extracted from the second drawer. It was so simple! I quite envy the brain of that thief. It is a lesson worth the price of the things he took--if only they had belonged to some one else.... “Thax Vail!” she broke off indignantly. “Stop looking as if you’d been slapped! You’re not going to feel badly about this. I forbid you to. Here we all forced ourselves upon you, and turned your home upside down, against your will! And if we’re the losers, it’s our own fault, not yours. We--” She stopped her efforts at consolation, catching sight of Clive Creede, who slipped unobtrusively into the room. A minute earlier she had seen him go out and had heard his step on the stairs. “Well,” she challenged, as she peered up shrewdly into his troubled white face. “Another county heard from? How much?” Clive laughed, in an assumption of carelessness, and glanced apologetically at Thaxton. “Not much,” he made shift to answer the garrulous old lady. “Just a little bunch of bills I’d left on my chiffonier and--and a watch. That’s all.” “The Argyle watch?” cried Miss Lane, in genuine concern. “Not the Argyle watch. Oh, you poor boy!” “What might the Argyle watch be?” acidly queried Mrs. Mosely. “It must be something priceless, since it seems to stir you people up more than our $12,000 loss. But then--of course--” “The Argyle watch,” explained Doris, forestalling a hot rejoinder from Vail, “is a big, old-fashioned, gold, hunting-case watch that the Duke of Argyle offered as a scholarship prize once at the University of Edinburgh. Mr. Creede’s father won it, as a young man. And it was his dearest possession. I don’t wonder Mr. Creede feels so about its loss. He--”