This arrangement commended itself to Mr. Troy’s professional caution.  He went on to Whitehall, and he tried the detective police.

They at once adopted the obvious conclusion to persons of ordinary capacity—­the conclusion that Isabel was the thief.

Acting on this conviction, the authorities sent an experienced woman from the office to Lady Lydiard’s house, to examine the poor girl’s clothes and ornaments before they were packed up and sent after her to her aunt’s.  The search led to nothing.  The only objects of any value that were discovered had been presents from Lady Lydiard.  No jewelers’ or milliners’ bills were among the papers found in her desk.  Not a sign of secret extravagance in dress was to be seen anywhere.  Defeated so far, the police proposed next to have Isabel privately watched.  There might be a prodigal lover somewhere in the background, with ruin staring him in the face unless he could raise five hundred pounds.  Lady Lydiard (who had only consented to the search under stress of persuasive argument from Mr. Troy) resented this ingenious idea as an insult.  She declared that if Isabel was watched the girl should know of it instantly from her own lips.  The police listened with perfect resignation and decorum, and politely shifted their ground.  A certain suspicion (they remarked) always rested in cases of this sort on the servants.  Would her Ladyship object to private inquiries into the characters and proceedings of the servants?  Her Ladyship instantly objected, in the most positive terms.  Thereupon the “Inspector” asked for a minute’s private conversation with Mr. Troy.  “The thief is certainly a member of Lady Lydiard’s household,” this functionary remarked, in his politely-positive way.  “If her Ladyship persists in refusing to let us make the necessary inquiries, our hands are tied, and the case comes to an end through no fault of ours.  If her Ladyship changes her mind, perhaps you will drop me a line, sir, to that effect.  Good-morning.”

So the experiment of consulting the police came to an untimely end.  The one result obtained was the expression of purblind opinion by the authorities of the detective department which pointed to Isabel, or to one of the servants, as the undiscovered thief.  Thinking the matter over in the retirement of his own office—­and not forgetting his promise to Isabel to leave no means untried of establishing her innocence—­Mr. Troy could see but one alternative left to him.  He took up his pen, and wrote to his friend at the Government office.  There was nothing for it now but to run the risk, and try Old Sharon.

CHAPTER IX.

THE next day, Mr. Troy (taking Robert Moody with him as a valuable witness) rang the bell at the mean and dirty lodging-house in which Old Sharon received the clients who stood in need of his advice.

They were led up stairs to a back room on the second floor of the house.  Entering the room, they discovered through a thick cloud of tobacco smoke, a small, fat, bald-headed, dirty, old man, in an arm-chair, robed in a tattered flannel dressing-gown, with a short pipe in his mouth, a pug-dog on his lap, and a French novel in his hands.