Mrs. Jenkins closed the door of the dining-room as noiselessly as if Helen, two stories above, might have been disturbed by its sound, and instinctively the two women addressed each other in a whisper. 'O, my dear Bess,' said Miss Montressor, 'what an awful thing this is! To think of our having talked about her that night and what she would wear at the play, and her husband being murdered all the time, and our knowing him.' 'Awful, indeed,' said Mrs. Jenkins, as she seated herself by her sister and possessed herself of her hand, 'but tell me, what is this about this pin?' 'What pin? asked Miss Montressor, momentarily oblivious. 'The pin you left on the table here yesterday--how did you come by it?' 'How did I come by it--didn't Mrs. Griswold tell you?' 'She! bless you, she has not been able to speak two rational words since the doctor came yesterday.' 'Why, that is one of the great points in the case, Bess. Mr. Foster, or rather Mr. Griswold, gave me that pin a few days before we left London, and told me himself that it belonged to his wife. It went a great way in making us sure that he was Mr. Griswold, and they say it is a most important piece of conviction in case they catch the murderers.' 'Well,' said Mrs. Jenkins, shaking her head, and looking extremely puzzled, 'it is very odd; I have seen that carved head before, only there were two of them, and they were not pins, they were wrist buttons. I know the thing as well as I know my own wedding-ring; and how Mrs. Griswold ever got hold of them is strange, for my Ephraim bought those very heads--I can swear by the little speck in the edge of the cap in that one of them up-stairs now--when he was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Moffat, as a courier at Rome, for a mere nothing. He believed them to be shams, but some one who knew all about such things told him afterwards they were nothing of the sort; that they were real antiques--I suppose you know what that means, Clara? I don't, except being very old, and dug up somewhere; and the same person said that the man who sold them to my Eph must have stolen them, for they were worth ten times the price he gave for them, and he got ten times the price when he sold them afterwards to Warren.' 'Who is Warren?' said Miss Montressor. It was on the tip of Mrs. Jenkins's tongue, when she happily remembered her husband's injunctions not to talk of him, so she simply said: 'Nobody particular; a man Eph knew in the way of business; but I cannot understand how Mrs. Griswold came by them.'