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 intelligence.
So Sally ended by believing it rather more than possible that Mrs. Gosnold knew as well as the girl herself who had consummated the crime--or, at all events, shared the damning suspicions engendered in Sally's mind by circumstantial evidence.
Lyttleton, of course: Sally entertained but the slenderest doubts of his black guilt.
If innocent, what had he been carrying hidden in the hollow of his arm? What had he left down there on the beach? Why had he left it there? Why such anxiety to escape observation as to make the man alert to notice Sally's head peering over the parapet of the landing at the head of the cliff? And if he had been employed in no way to be ashamed of, and had no consequences to fear, why that roundabout way up the cliff again and that ambush of his watcher?
And why those signals between window and yacht, if not to apprise the latter that something had been consummated, that the coast was clear for its tender to come in and take away the plunder?
It would seem, then, that Mr. Lyttleton must have had a confederate in the house, and for that role Mrs. Standish was plainly designated. An understanding of some close sort between her and Lyttleton had been quite evident from the very first day. And whose bedchamber window had shown the signals, if not hers? Not the pretty young widow's--not in any likelihood Mrs. Artemas'. To believe the latter intimate with the affair was to assume an understanding between her and Lyttleton--or else Trego.