“Madam,” he said, “I thank you for your kind invitation, but—­it will be impossible for us to accept.  I had intended to break the good news earlier, but this little game of burglar-in-a-corner prevented me.  The fact is, your Jap has been discovered to have nothing more serious than chicken-pox, and—­if you will forgive a poultry yard joke, there is no longer any necessity for your being cooped up.”

Then he retired, quite pleased with himself.

One would have thought we had exhausted our capacity for emotion, but Jim said a joyful emotion was so new that we hardly knew how to receive it.  Every one shook hands with every one else, and even the nurse shared in the excitement and gave Jim the medicine she had prepared for Tom.

Then we all sat down and had some champagne, and while they were waiting for the police wagon, they gave some to poor McGuirk.  He was still quite shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter stuck.  The wine cheered him a little, and he told his story, in a voice that was creaky from disuse, while Tom held my hand under the table.

He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a closet in one of the maids’ rooms—­the one where we had put Jim.  It was Jim waking out of a nap and declaring that the closet door had moved by itself and that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had roused the suspicions of the men in the house—­and he slept at night on the coal in the cellar.  He was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand over his scrubby chin, and said he hadn’t had a shave for a week.  He took somebody’s razor, he said, but he couldn’t get hold of a portable mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the glass in the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had to run and hide.  He told, too, of his attempts to escape, of the board on the roof, of the home-made rope, and the hole in the cellar, and he spoke feelingly of the pearl collar and the struggle he had made to hide it.  He said that for three days it was concealed in the pocket of Jim’s old smoking coat in the studio.

We were all rather sorry for him, but if we had made him uncomfortable, think of what he had done to us.  And for him to tell, as he did later in court, that if that was high society he would rather be a burglar, and that we starved him, and that the women had to dress each other because they had no lady’s maids, and that the whole lot of us were in love with one man, it was downright malicious.

The wagon came for him just as he finished his story, and we all went to the door.  In the vestibule Aunt Selina suddenly remembered something, and she stepped forward and caught the poor fellow by the arm.

“Young man,” she said grimly.  “I’ll thank you to return what you took from me last Tuesday night.”

McGuirk stared, then shuddered and turned suddenly pale.

“Good Lord!” he ejaculated.  “On the stairs to the roof!  You?”