She had not lost all those red and white and chubby charms which had attracted poor old Dibble in those early days of his London situation; but she was not so rosy nor so fat, nor so well dressed as she was when we saw her strumming out the “Old Hundredth” at that little square piano in Still Street; neither was she so demonstrative, nor yet quite so overbearing in her manner. But she still presumed upon her boarding-school education, and the high position of her pa as a builder, and the matrimonial offers she had had before she condescended to marry Thomas Dibble. “Your husband, Mrs. Dibble, edged on by your taunts about your losses, and his own affection for you, has appropriated three hundred pounds.” “Appropriated,” said Mrs. Dibble; “a fine word, thir, and one as I remember well to have written over and over again at boarding-school, but I am not quite clear about the exact meaning of it.” “Prepare to hear the very worst news possible, Mrs. Dibble, and then I will tell you what it means.” “Don’t, thir; O don’t, thir!” said Mrs. Dibble. “I know now, I know; Thomas is a thief, I know. Yeth, yeth; I thee it all!” “Don’t agitate yourself,” said the detective; “pray be calm. I have good news to come as well,--very good news.” But Mrs. Dibble would agitate herself; Mrs. Dibble would not be calm; Mrs. Dibble would insist upon moaning and crying and rocking herself to and fro, and bursting her hooks-and-eyes, and undoing her cap-strings and letting her curls come down. Mrs. Dibble was, indeed, most perverse. “The money has been restored to its owner, and Dibble will, no doubt, get off with a month or two,” said the detective. “Get off with a month or two, thir; what do you mean? A month or two of what?” “Imprisonment, of course,” said Bales. “O dear! O dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Dibble, the tears really coming into her eyes now, and her cap-strings too, blinding her with pink ribbon and “round saline globules,” as that smart reporter friend of ours would say,--“What will become of me! I shall descend with grey hairs to the grave! and to think that I wath once at a boarding-school, the envy of them all, and the daughter of a gentleman, thir; yeth, a gentleman, though I thay it. O dear! O dear! Thomath, Thomath, what have you done!” “I have told you what Thomas has done,” said Bales, in his calm, imperturbable way; “and now I will tell you the good news I have for you, if you will only be quiet. The Right Honourable the Countess of Verner sends you this,--it is a fifty-pound note; and she requests you to pack up your things and come down to Montem Castle with me.” Mrs. Dibble glanced at the note and listened to the detective’s words, but continued to moan and cry. She did not know what else to do; for she was not quite sure that Bales was not deceiving her. “The lady, it appears, was once in your house: she is Lieutenant Somerton’s sister: if I told you that much, she said, you would understand.”