Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/129

Rh What what was this? The key did not turn. Like lightning the terrible thought seized her. The lock had been tampered with. Good God! what she most feared, then, was true! Sleeping on the same floor, her son had access to the room at all times. No one in the house would bar his entrance at any hour of the day when she was away at her work, and it was while she had been away at her work in distant parts of London that the mischief had certainly been wrought. The desk was broken open; her watch, the half-sovereign she had hidden in the little wash-leather case which held it, the locket containing the coloured portrait of her husband, her mother-in-law's old-fashioned Swedish ring, the half-dozen krone and two-krone pieces, all were gone!

No one but her son could have taken the things, for no one but her son knew where she hid the key of her room when she locked it up on going out for the day. It was in an inaccessible chink in the rotten boards of the passage which flanked her door, and was covered not only by a loose piece of the woodwork but by the mat she had placed there some years later to keep out the draughts of an exceptionally bitter winter. The boy, when a little fellow, had always insisted on hiding the key for her whenever they had to leave the house, and found it again with delighted chucklings on their return. Yes, certainly her son knew

The thought almost choked her. The secret of the missing brooch, the missing sovereign, his long absence, all was made clear. She knew now that while he had money he would not work. Had he not run away from two excellent situations, one after another, when he was little more than eighteen? Had he not been recovered from some disreputable den the year after, when she was three weeks searching the town? Yes. On each occasion, she recollected, in looking back, she had missed Rh