"But in this she entirely failed, and here was the first dead stop. You will remember that she said that, after she left Mrs. Levison, she went downstairs and saw Mrs. Aaron and Mr. Reuben fully dressed in the back parlour, and that afterward she heard Mr. Reuben call a taxi: obviously, therefore, Mrs. Aaron had the diamonds in her possession then, since she was wearing them at the ball, and it is not conceivable that either of those two would have gone off in the taxi, leaving the other to force an entrance into Mrs. Levison's room, strangle her, and steal the diamonds. As Mrs. Aaron could not possibly have done all that in her evening-dress, making her way afterwards from a first floor window down into the yard by clinging to a creeper in the pouring rain, the hideous task must have devolved on Reuben, and even the police, wildly in search of a criminal, could not put the theory forward that a man would murder his mother in order that his sister-in-law might wear a few diamond stars at a ball. "It was, in fact, the motive of the crime that seemed so utterly inadequate, and therefore public argument fell back on the theory that Reuben had stolen the diamond stars just before dinner after he had found his mother's handbag in the shop, and that the subsequent murder was the result of ordinary burglary, the miscreant having during the night entered Mrs. Levison's room by the window while she was asleep. It was suggested that he had found the key of the safe by the bedside and was in the act of ransacking the place when Mrs. Levison woke, and the inevitable struggle ensued resulting in the old lady's death. The chief argument, however, against this theory was the fact that the unfortunate woman was still dressed when she was attacked, and no one who knew her for the careful, thrifty woman she was could conceive that she would go fast asleep leaving the safe door wide open. This, coupled with the fact that not the slightest trace could be found anywhere in the backyard of the house, or the adjoining yards and walls of the passage, of a miscreant armed with a ladder, constituted another dead stop on the road of public conjecture. "Finally, when at the adjourned inquest Reuben Levison was able to bring forward more than one witness who could swear that he arrived at the ball at the Kensington Town Hall in the company of his sister-in-law somewhere about ten o'clock, and others who spoke to him from time to time during the evening, it seemed clear that he, at any rate, was innocent of the murder. Mr. Aaron had not gone up to bed until ten o'clock, and, if Reuben had planned to return and murder his mother, he could only have done so at a later hour, when he was seen by several people at the Kensington Town Hall.