Josie always had a feeling that, sooner or later, the Hortense Markle mystery would be solved. She had the thought constantly in the back of her busy brain, but, since the men who were implicated in the wholesale robberies that had been committed throughout the whole of the United States, had one and all been caught, the police seemed to feel that the woman was not worth hunting for. Josie knew that it was the genius of the woman as much as that of her husband that had made the robberies so successful and she knew also that a character like Hortense Markle’s could not be downed but would, in the course of time, assert itself in other channels of wickedness. No doubt she had left America and was in some foreign country awaiting the release of her husband from the penitentiary. The love she bore her husband was the one good point in her character. At least, it was the only good point Josie was ready to grant her. With all Hortense’s charm, wit and beauty, artistic taste, and efficiency, she was, according to Josie and Mary Louise’s other friends, rotten to the core.
What they could not forgive in the fascinating Mrs. Markle was her treachery in regard to Mary Louise, the beloved of Dorfield. Mary Louise herself made excuses for the Markles, but then Mary Louise always made excuses for everybody.
“They were brought up wrong!” or, “They must have been greatly tempted!” or perhaps, “They inherited some weakness from their ancestors!” she would say when the exciting topic of the attempted robbery of all her wedding gifts was under discussion, as it often was at the Higgledy Piggledy Shop.
“Oh, gracious me, Mary Louise, you can’t see straight for sheer goodness!” Josie exclaimed at one of these occasions. “If the Markles weren’t wicked--as wicked as his Satanic Majesty--then their parents must have been, to bring them up so badly; or, if not their parents, at least some of their forbears from whom they inherited their traits. The blame has to go somewhere and it might just as well be put on Felix and the fair Hortense as on their dead progenitors. No doubt said Satanic Majesty is able to entertain the whole bunch of them in the lower regions.”
Mary Louise smiled and, taking from the book shelves a well worn copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, turned the leaves at random and read bits aloud.