"Don't cry, girl; there's nothing to cry at. You'll laugh at and be ashamed of yourself in the morning. I'll tell you what--I'll make an exception!--you shall have half my bed, and for the rest of the night we'll sleep together." CHAPTER V A REPRESENTATIVE OF LAW AND ORDER The next morning, information was given to a passing policeman of the events of the night, and in the course of the day an officer came round from the local station to learn particulars. Madge received him in solitary state; she had refused Ella's offer to stop away from business to keep her company, declaring that for that day, at any rate, she would be safe from undesirable intruders. The officer was a plain-clothes man, middle-aged, imperfectly educated, with the stolid, matter-of-fact, rather stupid-looking countenance which one is apt to find an attribute of the detective of fact, rather than fiction. "You say you didn't see him?" "I saw the back of him." "Hum!" This stands for a sort of a kind of a sniff. "Would you know him if you saw him again?" "From the glimpse which I caught of him last night I certainly shouldn't. It was pretty dark, and he was twenty or thirty yards down the road when I first caught sight of his back." "You didn't follow him?" "We did not." Madge smiled as she thought of how such a suggestion would have been received had it been made at the time. "He came in through the back window and left through the front?" "That's it." "And he took nothing?" "No--but he left something behind him--he left this." Madge produced the half-sheet of paper which Ella had picked up from the floor. "You're sure this was his property?" "I'm sure it isn't ours, and I'm sure we found it in this room just after he left it." The officer took the paper; read it, turned it over and over; looked it up and down; read it again. Then he gave his mouth a rather comical twist; then he looked at Madge with eyes which he probably intended to be pregnant with meaning. "Hum!" He paused to cogitate. "I suppose you know there's been a burglary here before?" "I know nothing of the kind. We have only been here six weeks, and are quite strangers to the place." "There was. Something more than a year ago. The house was empty at the time. The man who did it was caught at the job--and our chap got pretty well knocked about for his pains. But that wasn't the only time we've had business at this house; our fellows have been here a good many times." "Neither my friend or I had the slightest notion that the house had such a reputation." "I daresay not. It's been empty a good long time. I expect the stories which were told about it were against its letting." "What sort of stories?" "All sorts--nonsense, most of them." "Were the people who lived here named Ossington?"