let hat, coming to say "Good-bye" to her mistress.
She wouldn't, she said tearfully, work anywhere where anybody thought she had stolen anything. She was just as honest as anybody else, and more than some, and just as much entitled to respect, and if she couldn't get it in one place she could in another, because she knew places where people wouldn't accuse her of being a th-thief after she had worked for them for two long years without ever taking so much as a slice of bread.
Mrs. Leggett pleaded with her, reasoned with her, scolded her, and commanded her, but none of it was any good. The brown girl's mind was made up. She went away. Mrs. Leggett looked at me as severely as her pleasant face would let her, and said a reprovingly: "Now see what you've done."
I said I was sorry, and Leggett and I went out to search the lawn. We didn't find any more diamonds.
II
Leaving Leggett's, I put in a couple of hours canvassing the neighborhood, trying to place the man Mrs. and Miss Leggett had seen. I didn't have any luck on him, but I picked up news of another suspicious character.
A Mrs. Priestly—a pale semi-invalid who lived three doors below the Leggetts—gave me the first news of him. She often sat at a front window in the dark at night, when she couldn't sleep, looking into the street. On two nights she had seen this man.
The first time had been a week ago. He had passed up and down the other side of the street five or six times, at intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes, with his face turned as if he was watching something on Mrs. Priestly's—and the Leggetts'—side of the street. She thought it was between eleven and twelve o'clock when she had seen him the first time, and perhaps one o'clock the last. Several nights later—Saturday night—she had seen him again, not walking, this time, but standing on the corner below, looking up the street, at a little after midnight. He went away after she had watched him for half an hour, down the street, and she had not seen him again.
She said he was a fairly tall man of medium build, young, she thought, and he walked with his head thrust out in front. The street was too dark for her to describe his clothes,
Mrs. Priestly knew all the Leggetts by sight, but said she knew very little about them, except that the daughter was supposed to be a trifle wild. They seemed to be nice people, but kept to themselves. He had moved into the house in 1921, alone except for the housekeeper, a Mrs. Begg, who, Mrs. Priestly understood, was now keeping house for a family named Freemander in Berkeley. Mrs. Leggett and Gabrielle had not come to live with Leggett until 1923.
Mrs, Priestly said she had not been at her window the previous night, and she had not seen the man Mrs. Leggett and her daughter had seen.
A man named Warren Darley, who lived on the opposite side of the street from the Leggetts, but down near the corner on which Mrs. Priestly had seen her man, had, when locking up the house one night, surprised a man—apparently the same one Mrs. Priestly had seen—in his vestibule. Darley was not at home when I called, but Mrs. Darley, after telling me this much, got her husband on the phone for me.
Darley said the man had been standing in the vestibule, either hiding from or watching someone in the street. As soon as Darley opened the door the man ran away, paying no attention to Darley's "What are you doing there?" Darley said he was a man of thirty-five or six, fairly well dressed in dark clothes, and with a very long, thin and sharp nose.
