“I swear to you,” said she earnestly, after a short pause, “that it was she who gave me back the picture and begged me to give it to you and to ask you to say nothing, to ask nothing, but to be content to have recovered it.” He turned round to face his wife. “Ask her to come and speak to me,” said he quickly. “If I do, she will leave the house at once. She told me so,” said she sharply. Sir Robert rose from his chair, and paced up and down the room. “There is something more in this,” said he with decision. “Do you doubt my word?” “Not for a moment, of course. But what I mean is that what she has told you is not the whole of the truth. She is shielding some one else, the guilty person.” Lady Sarah drew herself up. “What is the divinity that hedges Miss Pembury,” she asked haughtily, “that she must be considered incapable of any sort of error?” He stopped and answered her steadily. “She is a perfectly noble and irreproachable lady,” he said, “and as incapable of a mean and despicable theft as you are yourself.” His wife looked down, with the blood rising in her cheeks. “You will then be satisfied with her message. You won’t try to find out anything more?” she said in a low voice. “I will say nothing to any one at present,” he said quietly. “I think, Sarah, you must be satisfied with that.” She looked at him doubtfully, but affected to think that he had given her the promise she wanted; and then she kissed him and tripped out of the room. But she left her husband in a state of acute distress. It was not possible for him to believe that his wife had deliberately deceived him, although even that sometimes seemed more likely than that the patient, high-minded Rhoda should have been guilty of deception and ingratitude. But he felt sure that he had only heard part of the story, and the conclusion to which he still clung, after turning the matter over in his mind, was that Rhoda was shielding some one else. Who that some one was, however, he had no idea. And that it could be the man who had been dear to him for so many years, in conjunction with his own wife, who had robbed him, never for one moment entered the baronet’s mind. He was far too loyal himself to suspect disloyalty in his nearest and dearest, and his conjecture was that it was some member of his household, one of the under servants, and not one of those who had been in his service many years, who had committed the theft both of the picture and of the snuff-boxes. Knowing, as he did, that Rhoda had been the first to discover the theft of the picture, he decided that she must have found out more than she confessed to have done, but that she held her peace until she had forced the thief to restore at least part of the plunder. Withal he was hurt to think that she had not come straight to him herself. Surely she might have known that she could come to him without fear, and that he would temper justice with mercy.