He was, therefore, a little impatient to find Bronson waiting up for him.

“I thought I told you to go to bed, Bronson.”

“You did, sir, but—­but I have something to tell you.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“I should like to say it now, Mr. Derry.”  The old man’s eyes were anxious.  “It’s about your father—­”

“Father?”

“Yes.  I told you I didn’t like the nurse.”

“Miss Merritt?  Well?”

“Perhaps I’d better get you to bed, sir.  It’s a rather long story, and you’d be more comfortable.”

“You’d be more comfortable, you mean, Bronson.”  The impatient note had gone out of Derry’s voice.  Temporarily he pigeon-holed his thoughts of Jean, and gave his attention to this servant who was more than a servant, more even than a friend.  To Derry, Bronson wore a sort of halo, like a good old saint in an ancient woodcut.

Propped up at last among his pillows, pink from his bath and in pale blue pajamas, Derry listened to what the old man had to say to him.

Bronson sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair with Muffin at his knees.  “From the first day I had a feeling that she wasn’t just—­straight.  I don’t know why, but I felt it.  She had one way with the General and another with us servants.  But I didn’t mind that, not much, until she went into your mother’s room.”

“My mother’s room?” sharply.  “What was she doing there, Bronson?”

“That’s what I am going to tell you, sir.  You know that place on the third floor landing, where I sits and looks through at your father when he ain’t quite himself, and won’t let me come in his room?  Well, there was one night that I was there and watched her—­”

Derry’s quick frown rebuked him.  “You shouldn’t have done that, Bronson.”

“I had a feeling, sir, that things were going wrong, and that the General wasn’t always himself.  I shouldn’t ever have said a thing to you, Mr. Derry,” earnestly, “if I hadn’t seen what I did.”

He cleared his throat.  “That first night I saw her open the door between your father’s room and the sitting room, and she did it careful and quiet like a person does when they don’t want anybody to know.  The sitting room was dark, but I went down and stood behind the curtain in the General’s door, and I could see through, and there was a light in your mother’s room and a screen set before it.”

“I took a big chance, but I slid into the sitting room, and I could see her on the other side of the screen, and she had opened the safe behind the Chinese scroll, and she was trying on your mother’s diamonds.”

“What!”

Bronson nodded solemnly.  “Yes, sir, she had ’em on her head and her neck and her fingers—.”

“You don’t mean—­that she took anything.”

“Oh, no, sir, she’s no common thief.  But she looked at herself in the glass and strutted up and down, up and down, up and down, bowing and smiling like a—­fool.”