riel nor
Joseph Chestermarke appeared to have any proper appreciation of the
dignity of a detective-sergeant of the Criminal Investigation
Department, and their eyes had regarded him as if he were something
very inferior indeed. Starmidge, though by no means a vain man, felt
nettled by such treatment, and he accordingly formed something very like
a prejudice against the two partners. That prejudice was quickly
followed by suspicion--especially in the case of Joseph Chestermarke.
According to Starmidge's ideas, the bankers, if they really believed
Horbury to have absconded, if certain securities of theirs really were
missing, if they really thought that Horbury had carried them off, and
the Countess of Ellersdeane's jewels with him, ought to have placed
every information in their power at the disposal of the police: it was
suspicious, and strange, and not at all proper, that they didn't. And it
was suspicious, too, that the housekeeper, Mrs. Carswell, should take
herself off after a brief exchange of words with Joseph. It looked very
much as if the junior partner had either warned her to go, or had told
her to go. Why had she gone _then_?--when she might have gone before.
And why in such haste? Clearly, considering everything, there were
grounds for believing that there was some secret between Mrs. Carswell
and Joseph Chestermarke.

Anyway, rightly or wrongly, Starmidge was suspicious of the junior
partner in Chestermarke's Bank, and he wanted to know everything that he
could find out about him. He had already learnt that Joseph, like his
uncle, was a confirmed bachelor, and lived in an old house at the corner
of Cornmarket, somewhat--so far as the town-folk could judge--after the
fashion of a hermit. Starmidge would have given a good deal for a really
good excuse to call on Joseph Chestermarke at that house, so that he
might see the inside of it: indeed, if he had only met with a better
reception at the bank, he would have invented such an excuse. But if
Gabriel was icily stand-offish, Joseph was openly sneering and
contemptuous, and the detective knew that no excuse would give him
admittance. Still, there was the outside: he would take a look at that.
Starmidge was a young man of ideas as well as of ability, and without
exactly shaping his thought in so many words, he felt--vaguely perhaps,
but none the less strongly--that just as you can size up some men by the
clothes they wear, so you can get an idea of others by th