“No! The effrontery! How dared he! In his own name, too!”
“Well, you see, a plausible pretext for leaving Peking could easily be invented by him—the death of a relative, the illness of a father or mother. And Sir George, though he might dislike the idea of the young man going to England so soon after his daughter’s departure, and may, perhaps, write to you by the next mail on the matter, was utterly powerless to prevent his so doing. This young man, like Miss Monroe and the O’Gradys, also landed at Plymouth. I had only arrived so far in my investigation when I went to your house yesterday afternoon. By chance, as I waited a few minutes in your drawing-room, another important item of information was acquired. A fragment of conversation between your nephew and the supposed Miss Monroe fell upon my ear, and one word spoken by the young lady convinced me of her nationality. That one word was the monosyllable ‘Hush.’ ”
“No! You surprise me!”
“Have you never noted the difference between the ‘hush’ of an Englishman and that of an Irishman? The former begins his ‘hush’ with a distinct aspirate, the latter with as distinct a W. That W is a mark of his nationality which he never loses. The unmitigated ‘whist’ may lapse into a ‘whish’ when he is is transplanted to another soil, and the ‘whish’ may in course of time pass into a ‘whush,’ but to the distinct aspirate of the English ‘hush,’ he never attains. Now Miss O’Grady’s was as pronounced a ‘whush’ as it was possible for the lips of a Hibernian to utter.”
“And from that you concluded that Mary O’Grady was playing the part of Miss Monroe in my house?”
“Not immediately. My suspicions were excited, certainly; and when I went up to her room, in company with Mrs. Hawke’s maid, those suspicions were confirmed. The orderliness of that room was something remarkable. Now, there is the orderliness of a lady in the arrangement of her room, and the orderliness of a maid, and the two things, believe me, are widely different. A lady, who has no maid, and who has the gift of orderliness, will put things away when done with, and so leave her room a picture of neatness. I don’t think, however, it would for a moment occur to her to pull things so as to be conveniently ready for her to use the next time she dresses in that room. This would be what a maid, accustomed to arrange a room for her mistress’s use, would do mechanically. Miss Monroe’s room was the neatness of a maid—not of a lady, and I was assured by Mrs. Hawke’s maid that it was a neatness accomplished by her own hands. As I stood there, looking at that room, the whole conspiracy—if I may so call it—little by little pieced itself together, and became plain to me. Possibilities quickly grew into probabilities, and these probabilities once admitted, brought other suppositions in their train. Now, supposing that Miss Monroe and Mary O’Grady had agreed to change places, the Peking heiress, for the time being, occupying Mary O’Grady’s place in the humble home at Cork and vice versa, what means of communicating with each other had they arranged? How was Mary O’Grady to know when she might lay aside her assumed role and go back to her mother’s house. There was no denying the necessity for such communication; the difficulties in its way must have been equally obvious to the two girls. Now, I think we must admit that we must credit these young women with having hit upon a very clever way of meeting those difficulties. An anonymous and startling missive sent to you would be bound to be mentioned in the house, and in this way a code of signals might be set up between them that could not direct suspicion to them. In this connection, the Danvers crest, which it is possible that they mistook for a dagger, suggested itself naturally, for no doubt Miss Monroe had many
