"I should have told him that, to pacify him, whether you had said it or
not," candidly avowed Mrs. Jenkins. "And now I must go back home on the
run. As good have no one to mind my shop as that young house-girl of
ours. If a customer comes in for a pair of black stockings, she'll take
and give 'em a white knitted nightcap. She's as deficient of common
sense as Jenkins is. Your servant, sir. Good morning, young gentlemen!"

"Here, wait a minute!" cried Mr. Galloway, as she was speeding off. "I
cannot understand at all. The keys could not have been changed as they
lay on the flags."

"Neither can anybody else understand it," returned Mrs. Jenkins. "If
Jenkins was not a sober man--and he had better let me catch him being
anything else!--I should say the two, him and Ketch, had had a drop too
much. The bishop himself could make neither top nor tail of it. It'll
teach Jenkins not to go gallivanting again after other folk's
business!"

She finally turned away, and Mr. Galloway set himself to revolve the
perplexing narrative. The more he thought, the less he was nearer doing
so; like the bishop, he could make neither top nor tail of it. "It is
entirely beyond belief!" he remarked to Arthur Channing; "unless Ketch
took out the wrong keys!"

"And if he took out the wrong keys, how could he have locked the south
door?" interrupted Roland Yorke. "I'd lay anybody five shillings that
those mischievous scamps of college boys were at the bottom of it; I
taxed Gerald with it, and he flew out at me for my pains. But the
seniors may not have been in it. You should have heard the bell clank