which had framed
itself in her mind as she sped down the corridor from that remarkable
meeting in Mrs. Gosnold's rooms.

"I have not told you everything--but I am innocent," thus ran the
words which she felt were demanded of her and a legitimate privilege,
her duty to herself in sheer self-preservation. And as they
wrote themselves down before her mental vision she saw two heavy
strokes of the pen underlining "everything," and her own true name,
Sarah Manvers, following in the place of the signature--no more "Sara
Manwaring," Mrs. Gosnold's explicit commands to the contrary
notwithstanding.

But that had been an impulse, only natural in the first shock of
horror inevitably attending the disclosure of the robbery, to clear
herself; or, rather, to reaffirm her innocence.

For with second thought had come the consideration: Was she not
already cleared, was her innocence not already established?

She was prepared to believe that Mrs. Gosnold knew everything. That
extraordinary woman! What had she not known, indeed? Mark how
cunningly she had drawn from Sally the admission that she had been up
and about the house and grounds long after she had gone to her
bedchamber for the night--at the very time, most probably, when the
robbery was being done! And that had been by way of preface to the
pledge she had made Sally of her protection before startling
confession from the girl--a pledge not only given in advance, but by
implication at least renewed when the truth was out.

If she had believed Sally guilty, or party to the crime, or even
in possession of guilty knowledge of it, would she have made that
generous promise?

She was kind of heart, was Mrs. Gosnold, but she was nobody's fool; if
she had not been well satisfied in her own mind as to the thief she
would never have so committed herself to Sally, for she was no one to
give her word lightly or, as she herself had said, to bait a trap with
fair words and flattery.

In vain Sally searched her memory for anything to warrant an
assumption that her mistress had been in any way ignorant of that
black business of the small hours. She had neither denied such
knowledge nor asserted it, but had simply permitted Sally to leave out
of her account all reference to the overnight adventure.

And all that assorted consistently with her statement that she did not
wish to learn the thief's identity, as well as with her invention of a
means for obtaining restitution without such i