Her thoughts concentrated violently upon the key. Had her neighbours spoken she would not have heard; but they did not speak. She was free to let her thoughts run where they chose. They ran back to the first night of her meeting with Nelson Smith, and her arrival with him at the house in Torrington Square. She recalled, as if it were a moment ago, putting the key into his hand, which had been warm and steady, despite the danger he was in, while hers had been trembling and cold. She said to herself that she must ask Knight, as soon as they were alone together, what he had done with the key, whether he had left it in the house or flung it away. But of course he must have left it in the house, or close by, otherwise no thief would have known where it belonged. That made her feel guilty toward Ruthven Smith. She ought not to have been so utterly absorbed in her own affairs that night. She ought to have asked to have the key back, and then to have laid it where it could be found by Mrs. Ellsworth in the morning. Perhaps, indirectly, _she_ was responsible for the burglary at that house. And, now she thought of it, what a queer burglary it had been! The thieves must certainly have known something about Mrs. Ellsworth, or else, in helping themselves to her valuables, it would not have occurred to them to scrawl a sarcastic message. That message had delighted Knight when he heard of it. He had laughed and said, "I like those chaps! They can have _my_ money when they want it!" Since then they _had_ had his money, and other possessions. If the theory of the police were right, that a gang of foreign thieves was "working" London, Annesley was glad that she and Knight had been robbed. It made her feel less to blame for her carelessness in the matter of that latchkey. At least, she had suffered, too, and so had Knight. Could it be, she asked herself, that the _watchers_ were somehow mixed up in the business? Were _they_ members of the supposed gang? That did not seem likely, for how could a man like Knight have got involved with thieves? Yet it seemed, from what he had said that night at the Savoy--and never referred to again--as if he were somehow in their power. How curiously like one of them Morello had been! She remembered thinking so, with a shock of fear. Then she had lost the feeling of resemblance, and told herself that she must have imagined it. The two faces came back to her now, and again she saw them alike. She was glad that Knight had never invited Morello to call, and glad that when grudgingly she had asked one day after the two men who had witnessed their marriage, Knight had said, "Gone out of England. We just caught them in time." As for the watchers, she had heard no more of them. Knight ignored the episode, or the part of it connected with those men. The memory of them was shut up in the locked box of his past, and he never left the key lying about, as apparently he had left the key of Mrs. Ellsworth's house.