"How very strange!" he murmured, and there was no doubt he meant it.
"But about the master's ring, sir--" she began.
"You say he looked as though he were being _watched_?" he interrupted, but it was quite a polite and gentle interruption.
"Yes, sir; but the funny thing about losing the ring was that he never could get it off his finger before! I've seen him trying to, but oh, it wouldn't nearly come off!"
"Another mystery!" he murmured. "He lost a ring which wouldn't come off his finger? By Jove! That's very rum. Are there any more mysteries, Mary, connected with this house?"
She hesitated and then in a very low voice answered:
"Oh, yes, sir; there was one that gave me even a worse turn!"
By this time her visitor seemed to have given up all immediate thoughts of writing his note to Mr. Rattar. He turned his back to the table and looked at her with benevolent calm.
And then she told him the story of that dreadful night when the unknown visitor came for the box of old papers. He gazed at her, listening very attentively, and then in a soothing voice asked her several questions, more particularly when all these mysterious events occurred.
"And are these all your troubles now, Mary?" he enquired.
He asked so sympathetically that at last she even ventured to tell him her latest trouble. Till he fairly charmed it out of her, she had shrunk from telling him anything that seemed to reflect directly on her master or to be a giving away of his concerns. But now she confessed that Mr. Rattar's conduct, Mr. Rattar's looks, and even Mr. Rattar's very infrequent words had been troubling her strangely. How or why his looks and words should trouble her, she knew not precisely, and his conduct, generally speaking, she admitted was as regular as ever.
"You don't mean that just now and then he takes a wee drop too much?" enquired her visitor helpfully.
"Oh, no, sir," said she, "the master never did take more than what a gentleman should, and he's not a smoking gentleman either--quite a principle against smokers, he has, sir. Oh, it's nothing like that!"
She looked over her shoulder fearfully as though the walls might repeat her words to the master, as she told him of the curious and disturbing thing. Mr. Rattar had been till lately a gentleman of the most exact habits, and then all of a sudden he had taken to walking in his garden in a way he never did before. First she had noticed him, about the time of the burglary and the removal of the papers, walking there in the mornings. That perhaps was not so very disturbing, but since then he had changed this for a habit of slipping out of the house every night--every single night!