He asked himself what right he had to connect the arrest of a well-known shop-lifter with the presence of Miss Davison in that particular department of the stores where the theft appeared to have been detected. But even as he did so, and tried to think that he ought to be ashamed of his suspicions, he knew very well that they were justified; that the episode of the sparkling ornament passed by Miss Davison (or her “double”) to the man in the crowd on the night of the fête at Lord Chislehurst’s suggested inevitably that she was the person who was now to be arrested for theft. The thought was horrible. Even though, in this first moment of surprise and dismay, he had no doubts about her guilt, he was none the less as much distressed to think of the disgrace which awaited her as if she had been one of his own kin. For the puzzle, the marvel of the situation was that although he could not help his strong suspicions of Miss Davison’s honesty, he knew her to be as pure-souled as it is possible for a human being to be, and the conviction which had already been forming in his mind now grew stronger that she must be a kleptomaniac, and that she stole, if indeed she did steal, not from criminal intention, but by irresistible instinct. Of course this supposition did not account for everything. There were discrepancies in any story which he could make up to account for the strange behavior, the glaring inconsistencies of the beautiful girl who had roused his admiration and inspired him with an unconquerable passion. She seemed far too sane and well-balanced a girl to be subject to mania of any kind, and it seemed to him extraordinary, if she were really a prey to a disease so acute and so distressing, that she had not been put under some sort of restraint, or at least that she was not constantly shadowed by some companion who could explain her idiosyncrasy and pay for the things she stole. He had heard of such things being done in well-known cases of this kind, and he felt sure that she could not have become so expert as she evidently was without the fact of her tendencies becoming known to some, at least, of her friends. But even while he argued thus with himself, hoping against hope that he could prove to himself that she was innocent of criminal intent, one circumstance after another obtruded itself upon his mind, all tending to confirm the fact that she was too artful, too deliberate in her plans, for an innocent victim of instinct. The sending of her mother to Brighton, for instance, and the cleverness with which she played off Mrs. Davison and Lady Jennings, the one against the other, pretending to the one that she was staying with the other, when all the while she was absent on some mysterious and unexplained “business,” spoke, not of innocence, but of a very well developed and keen instinct for deceit of the most flagrant kind.