“But then if they found it there, why didn’t they return and let me go?”
“Because you would have found where they had brought you. They probably intended to keep you there till the dark of the next evening, and then take you away in a cab again and leave you some distance off. To prevent my following and possibly finding you they left here on your looking-glass this note” (Hewitt produced it), “threatening all sorts of vague consequences if you were not left to them. They knew you had come to me, of course, having followed you to my office. And now Penner feels himself anything but safe. He has relinquished his greengrocery and dispensed his stock in charity, and probably, having got the seal--the only thing he coveted in the world--he has taken himself off. Not so much perhaps from fear of punishment as for fear the seal may be taken from him, and with it the salvation his odd belief teaches him it will confer.” And then Hewitt related the circumstance of the smudgy boy and his sack of coals.
Mrs. Mallett sat silently for a little while, and then said in a rather softened voice, “Mr. Hewitt, I am not what is called a woman of sentiment, as you may have observed, and I have been most shamefully treated over this wretched seal--if that was really what Penner wanted. But if all you tell me has been actually what has happened, I have a sort of perverse inclination to forgive the man in spite of myself. The thing probably had been his mother’s--or, at any rate, he believed so--and his giving up his little all to attain the object of his ridiculous faith, and distributing his goods among the poor people and all that--really it’s worthy of an old martyr, if only it were done in the cause of a faith a little less stupid--though, of course, _he_ thinks his is the only religion, as others do of theirs. But then”--Mrs. Mallett stiffened again--“there’s not much to prove your theories, is there?”
Hewitt smiled. “Perhaps not,” he said, “except that, to my mind, at any rate, everything points to my explanation being the only possible one. The thing presented itself to you, from the beginning, as an attempt on the snuff-box you value so highly, and the possibility of the seal being the object aimed at never entered your mind. I saw it whole from the outside, and on thinking the thing over after our first interview, I remembered Joanna Southcott. I think you will find I am right.”
