The Lonely Bride by Fred M. White

With a feeling of thankfulness that she had not met anybody on the way, Grace went up to her own bedroom. Not till she had locked the door behind her did she feel safe. Then she placed the pearl stud on the dressing-table and examined it carefully. She was quite sure that there was no mistake. There was the stud right enough, or, at least, so much of it as was needful for the purposes of identification. The gold part of it was missing, or probably it had remained firmly fixed in Cattley's shirt-front; but here was the jewel right enough. It was a black pearl of peculiar shape, and Grace felt no hesitation in believing it to be the one she had seen Cattley wearing the night before.

But this discovery only added to the mystery. Her father had told her that Cattley had left the premises at least an hour before it would have been possible for Mr. Holder to respond to the letter of his employer and reach the bank. According to what Walters said it was fully eleven o'clock before Mrs. Pearson had heard Holder talking to some visitor in his private sitting-room. The farmer's wife could have made no mistake, because she was sitting up for her husband, and had one eye on the clock all the time. The only explanation possible for the moment that Grace could think of was that her father was deceiving her. According to his account, Mr. Cattley had left the bank house an hour before Holder received that letter. On the face of it this could not be possibly true, or if it was true, then the evidence of the pearl stud went for nothing. That her father had sent a letter to Holder, Grace felt certain. She had overheard Cattley suggest this course; indeed she had seen the messenger produced who was going to take the note. In choosing his messenger, Cattley had displayed considerable cunning. "Poor Billy," being a deaf mute, was not in the least likely to be in the position to tell anybody that he had visited Mr. Holder the night before. More than this, Cattley betrayed a knowledge of the people of the neighborhood, or he would not have picked out "Poor Billy" to act as his tool in the matter.