The Corbin necklace

By Henry Kitchell Webster

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Title: The Corbin necklace

Author: Henry Kitchell Webster

Release date: July 22, 2025 [eBook #76546]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1926

Credits: Susan E., David E. Brown, Edo Reich, Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CORBIN NECKLACE ***





THE CORBIN NECKLACE




  The Corbin Necklace

  By HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

  AUTHOR OF
  “The Innocents,” “Joseph Greer and His Daughter,”
  “Mary Wollaston,” “The Thoroughbred,” etc.

  [Illustration]

  A. L. BURT COMPANY
  Publishers        New York

  Published by arrangement with The Bobbs-Merrill Company
  Printed in U. S. A.




  COPYRIGHT, 1926
  BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

  _Printed in the United States of America_

  COPYRIGHT, 1926
  BY LIBERTY WEEKLY, INCORPORATED




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                PAGE

      I PUNCH--AND JUDY                     1

     II SHOAL WATER                        20

    III FRUSTRATION OF PUNCH               35

     IV SOMETHING BEHIND                   51

      V THE LEGS OF A SUIT OF PAJAMAS      77

     VI REWARD OF MERIT                    91

    VII IN THE SUMMER-HOUSE               102

   VIII EXPERT CONSIDERATION              115

     IX MYSTIFICATION OF EAGLE-EYE        139

      X TRANSFORMATION SCENE              155

     XI WHEN I CAME IN                    168

    XII AN EXCURSION INTO ARCADY          180

   XIII STUNG!                            196

    XIV A POINT OF HONOR                  212

     XV BLACK LOOKS                       220

    XVI THE GENTLE ART                    234

   XVII SOME MUST WATCH                   253

  XVIII PEACOCK FEATHERS                  268

    XIX THE AUTOCRAT                      288




THE CORBIN NECKLACE




THE CORBIN NECKLACE




CHAPTER I

PUNCH--AND JUDY


“How much do you suppose it’s really worth?” Punch wanted to know.

“Your grandmother’s necklace?” I inquired. It had been ten minutes or
so since we’d mentioned it. Evidently, though, it was still on his
mind. “Oh, something fabulous,” I told him.

But I saw at once that the reply hadn’t passed muster. It had
struck him, apparently, as a typically adult remark, frivolous, or
ignorant--or both. I don’t like being a typical adult to Punch so I
tried to do better.

“I don’t know much about pearls,” I said. “They’re a special subject.
And I haven’t even seen the necklace since your mother wore it at some
ball or other--oh, pre-war. Perhaps a dozen years ago. But you can put
it at this, safely enough. If it were sold and the money it brought
invested, even conservatively, it would produce an income one could
live on.”

“If you had to sell it to a fence, though,” Punch observed, “you
wouldn’t get near so much for it. And a regular jeweler would know
where it came from, if you’d stolen it, and call up the police. I
suppose the way to do would be to break the string and sell the pearls
one or two at a time. Even that would be pretty hard to do.”

“You aren’t planning to steal the necklace yourself, are you?” I
inquired.

He smiled politely, by way of acknowledging the joke, but without
losing his thoughtful air.

“It was horribly silly putting it in the paper, anyhow.”

“Putting what in the paper?”

“About how Gran was going to give it to Judy for a wedding present.
I’ve got it here. I tore it out of Tuesday’s paper. I thought perhaps
it was just as well not to have it lying around the house.”

He removed it in a wad from a pocket in his knickerbockers and brought
it around for me to see.

There were columns about Judith Corbin’s approaching wedding in
all the papers, these days. Justifiably, too, perhaps. If news is
whatever people are curious about, the Corbins have been news for
three generations. But the particular article which Punch had put into
my hand was written in the vein I most detest, knowing, insinuating,
pandering to the most abject form of snobbery.

“Confound American newspapers!” I said.

Punch caught me up sharply. “It isn’t their fault,” he declared.
“They’re better than the newspapers in any other country.”

His Americanism, I may remark, is almost rabid. As a result of his
having been dragged all over Europe for most of his boyhood, the
temperature of his patriotism is far above normal; say about one
hundred and four. It goes rather oddly with the rest of him for in the
other respects he’s an incorruptible realist.

“My remark about American newspapers is stricken out,” I said hastily.
“I didn’t mean to insult our country. But I agree with you that the
reference to the necklace is unfortunate. Of course your mother....”

I was going to say, “knows best,” or something like that, just to avoid
any implied criticism of Victoria. But Punch broke in.

“I don’t think it was mother who told them. She’s been kind of funny
about that necklace.”

Well, there were old reasons why the necklace should be a sore
point with Victoria. I didn’t feel like going into them with her
thirteen-year-old son.

“Where is it?” I asked. “In the bank, I suppose?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s down here. Grandmother’s got it in that silly old
safe of hers. Isn’t that the worst possible place to keep anything that
people might want to steal? It isn’t supposed to be hard at all to open
an ordinary safe. If Gran would just give it to me and let me hide it
for her, somewhere, it would be a whole lot safer.”

“I know,” I agreed, “that in every detective story and in most plays
there’s a character who can sandpaper the tips of his fingers and open
a safe quicker than I can break into a can of sardines. Whether experts
of that sort are really so numerous, or safes so little entitled to
their name, I don’t know.”

He didn’t a bit mind my laughing at him. “Well,” he said, “there’s
going to be big trouble, I bet, before this business is over.”

Certainly there’s no denying that in this instance Punch was a good
prophet.

It is probably unnecessary to remark that he derives his nickname from
the fact that his sister had been named Judith. He was christened John
Benedict Corbin, as were his father and grandfather, both now long
dead, before him. And perhaps, since I have been in a way commissioned
to set down an account of the business of the next few days and the
trouble it involved, I may as well begin being a little more explicit.
The consensus seems to be that I know as much about it as anybody,
though--or perhaps because--I have really been very little involved.

I might have been involved a good deal deeper, since I’m the Corbins’
only near neighbor. The original plan had been that on the occasion
of Judith’s wedding--an old-style country wedding it was to be--I
should keep bachelor’s hall for the groom, his best man and some of
the ushers. Also, as a traditional friend of the family, I’d have
been over at The Oaks most of the time from the beginning of the
festivities to the end. But my house, a few days earlier, had been
pretty well wrecked and gutted by a bad fire, and in the course of my
efforts to get things out of the burning building, I’d had the serious
misfortune--that, anyhow, was the way I felt about it at the time--to
break my leg.

In the light of ensuing events, I’m not altogether sorry that I had
to spend those wretched days in my gardener’s cottage with my leg
in a cast. It had, at least, its compensations. Nobody, as far as I
know, from first to last suspected me of complicity in, or even guilty
knowledge of, any crime. A pair of crutches, which I was frightfully
clumsy with, a twenty-pound cast on my leg and an iron-clad alibi
served to protect me. And with Punch for a daily visitor, I don’t think
I missed much of the excitement.

It is possible that since he takes his obligations seriously, he felt
he owed me something in return for the thrill he’d been afforded by my
fire and my broken leg. He’d helped the surgeon put on the cast--this
was before my nurse arrived--and he took a professional, almost a
proprietary, interest in the damaged limb from that point on. But I’m
proud to believe that Punch likes me. I’m not often, he’s good enough
to imply, betrayed into that levity in dealing with serious matters, to
which most of my generation are incorrigibly addicted. I’m coeval more
or less with his mother.

I’ve always known Victoria and got on with her well enough, though
I never was one of her numerous adorers. Perhaps it was their
numerousness that put me off. I haven’t, either, in the years since
her husband’s death, always applauded her judgment, especially in the
matter of bringing up her children. But I’d be the first to admit that
she’s had difficulties.

Oh well, perhaps, since I’ve already kept Punch waiting so long, I may
as well go ahead and tell my history right end to.

The first John Corbin’s father, Peter, I think his name was, came out
to these parts somewhere about the time of the Black Hawk War. His
ancestors had been seafaring folk--Newburyport, I think they came
from--and had prospered at it. Peter had money behind him, anyhow,
and he got possession of some thousands of acres of the best land in
Illinois--chased the Indians off it, I suppose--and built his first
house out of bricks that he made on the place.

His son, Punch’s grandfather, inherited the whole thing. He may have
been able enough, though I suspect the line was thinning out. Anyhow,
the most important thing about him is the woman he married.

I haven’t an idea who, in the social sense, she was. But certainly
for the past fifty years or so she has been a tremendous person. She
had two sons--she’d probably have had a dozen but for her husband’s
untimely death. She completely dominated the elder, Punch’s father, and
quarreled violently with the younger one, Alexander--she quarreled with
everybody she couldn’t dominate--so that he ran away, fought in the
Spanish War, went out to the Philippines and stayed there.

John married Victoria Ashcroft; he died two or three months before
Punch was born. Judy remembers him, of course, and adores his memory.
It’s one of the reasons, perhaps, why she doesn’t get on better with
her mother.

The proceeding years never softened up the old lady a bit. Her
husband’s will left the whole fortune in her hands, and she has used
it remorselessly as a club to enforce submission to her ideas. In the
main I think her ideas have been pretty sound--certainly her business
judgment has always been above reproach--but they aren’t Victoria’s
ideas in the least. It’s hard to imagine a more difficult position than
that of being old Mrs. Corbin’s daughter-in-law.

The famous necklace affords an illustration. As an adornment it has
long been useless to the old lady. She’s been crippled with arthritis
for years, living, from somewhere about dawn till nine o’clock at
night, in a wheel chair. Victoria used to wear the necklace frequently.
Pearls, I believe, and especially old pearls, need wear. And the thing
was popularly supposed to be hers.

But between the old lady and Victoria there was never any ambiguity
about it. The mother-in-law kept tabs on it most jealously; decreed
when it should be worn and when it should not, and kept it most of the
time in her possession. She has never liked Victoria, has often openly
mistrusted her, and it was easy to believe that her decision to give
the necklace to Judy was inspired by a wish to do Victoria out of it
finally.

With the children Victoria more nearly had her own way. She had some
money of her own, though nowhere near enough to carry out her program
for them, and as long as she could keep them away from The Oaks, far
enough away to sift out details, their grandmother’s edicts were of
little effect.

But too far Victoria dared not go. There could be no shadow of doubt
that the old lady was in her right mind and able to make a will, and
upon this will the disposal of the whole Corbin fortune depended. She
could found a theological seminary with it if she liked.

To make it harder for Victoria--as if it weren’t hard enough
already--she had not, during the past three or four years, got on very
well with Judy. Within the last few months we who were her friends had
vaguely understood that the difficulty had got a good deal worse, and
Judy was, for a while, a declared rebel. Victoria had been half frantic
between the necessity of winning Judy back and keeping all echoes
of the trouble from reaching Mrs. Corbin’s ears. This acute phase
had passed somehow, and Judy had come back, curiously sobered and,
superficially at least, tractable.

Now, of course, everything was lovely. Judy was going to be married
within a week to a man of whom not only her mother, but, marvelous to
relate, old Mrs. Corbin as well, heartily approved.

The old lady had never seen the man himself, for she never went east,
and no member of the Applebury clan had ever crossed the Alleghenies.
But they were the Appleburys of East Weston, Massachusetts; cautious,
solid, not too vulgarly rich. The family fortune had suffered somewhat,
we understood, from their Toryism during the Revolutionary War. It was
a good bet that they’d endure as long as Plymouth Rock. Anyhow, they
might be supposed to be capable of managing Judy. The girl was safe
now, old Mrs. Corbin thought, for life.

Victoria may have thought so too, but I take the liberty to doubt it.
Safe, anyhow, probably for the next four or five years. And if there
were an explosion then (I wouldn’t put it by Victoria to reflect)
it wouldn’t so frightfully matter, since the old lady would almost
certainly have been gathered to her fathers before that time.

_Nunc dimittis_, anyhow. For Punch would certainly never make any
trouble. He could get on with anybody. Even with his grandmother.

I looked across at him now. He was lost in a brown study, probably
about Monsieur Dupin or Sherlock Holmes, or some of their more recent
successors.

“When are your mother and Judy coming down?” I asked.

“Oh, Judy’s here,” he told me. “She came yesterday afternoon. Mother
was to have come with her, but she didn’t. She’ll come to-day, I
expect. She’d better, because the whole gang is coming to-morrow and
the house is still something awful. Decorators and curtain hangers
working around all over the place. Grandmother’s room is about the only
one that isn’t in a mess, and we’re not allowed in there.”

I could easily understand the need for all this renovating. The
hospitality of the old house hadn’t been taxed to capacity, as it was
going to be for this wedding, in years.

“How is Judy?” I asked.

“All right,” he said, a little doubtfully.

“Well, I assume?”

“Sure,” he said.

Then he grinned. “I’d found a new way of climbing up the outside of
the house--all the way to the roof. I went up yesterday, and she saw me
going by her window and came out and climbed up too. Then she came all
the way down. Not so bad for a girl, because there’s one place where
it’s kind of tricky. And then we took my new rifle and shot a tin can
off a fence post. She can shoot as well as I can. I don’t see what
_she_ wants to get married for. I don’t believe she does, either.”

Marriage was so evidently incomprehensible to Punch, except as a last
resort after the more enjoyable resources of living had come to an end,
that I didn’t take this last observation so very seriously.

We were saved from discussing it by the arrival just then of Judy
herself. Punch saw her before I did.

“Hello!” he exclaimed. “How did you get here?”

She came over and kissed me before she answered, and would have ignored
his question altogether if he hadn’t repeated it.

“Oh, in Trumble’s Ford,” she said. “At least I hope it was Trumble’s.
It was standing there in the yard where he always leaves it.”

“Well,” Punch said, getting up decisively, “as long as you’re here, I
think I’ll go back.”

“Brotherly love!” she commented, with a grin.

Punch explained--to me, rather than to her, “There ought to be somebody
in the house.”

“There were at least twenty when I left,” Judy remarked. “Florists’
people, upholsterers.... Heaven knows what!”

“That’s why,” said Punch. “Look here, I’m going to drive the Ford back.
You can come along on my bike.”

“I like your nerve!--Oh, it’s all right. Go along.”

She didn’t turn back to me until she’d seen him out of the cottage and
had heard the Ford go rattling away.

It didn’t seem credible that she was going to be married three days
from now. She looked, standing there hatless, disheveled, in her
tumbled slip of a dress, not a day over fifteen. She’d been bickering
with her brother like a little girl. What did she know--what could she
possibly understand--about marriage?

“I had a lot of nice things all ready to say to you”--she turned back
to me now with a funny little grimace of perplexity--“and Punch has put
them all out of my head.”

“Never mind them. And don’t blame Punch. He’s worrying about the famous
necklace.”

“Oh, damn the necklace!” she cried.

She might well enough have used an exclamation like that off-hand,
humorously, or by way of experiment to see if I’d be shocked. But
she didn’t use it in any of these ways. The thing had struck a nerve
somehow.

“That’s a reasonable enough wish,” I said, “on general principles. But
why particularly?”

“Did you see that silly story in the paper?” she asked. “About how Gran
was going to give it to me for a wedding present? It gave mother a
jolt, all right, when she read it yesterday at breakfast.”

“She hadn’t wanted it published, then?”

Judy stared. “Wanted it published? It was the first she’d heard of
it. And--well, she didn’t seem quite to know whether to believe me or
not when I said I hadn’t heard about it either. I told her it must
be just a newspaper guess. She’s always thought grandmother ought to
give it to her. And of course she ought. I told mother I didn’t want
it myself. If it was mine, the first thing I’d do with it would be to
sell it. Heavens! Think of having a thing around your neck or on your
dressing-table that was worth--how much? Fifty thousand dollars?”

“More like twice that, I suppose,” I told her.

She shivered.

“Well, I tried to talk mother out of it, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t
believe it was just a mare’s nest, whether it was news to me or not.
And she isn’t really sure it was.”

“What does your grandmother say about it?”

“Oh, I haven’t seen her since I came down. Miss Digby won’t let
me in. I suppose this happens to be one of the times when she
isn’t--presentable.”

I was rather aghast at that, and I dare say I showed it. Judy gave me
an intent look, and went on.

“You knew that, didn’t you? That she--takes something? Oh, I don’t know
what. Morphine, I suppose. Heaven knows I don’t blame her! I’d do it if
I were in her fix. Hope she’ll be all right for the wedding. Probably
will be. I suppose old Digs is just tuning her up.”

She didn’t look like a child as she said that.

Suddenly she came over and sat down on the edge of my couch, took one
of my hands and patted it.

“Do you want to hear all about the plans for the wedding, who the
bridesmaids are, and what they’re going to wear--the sort of man I’m
going to marry....”

“Tell me that,” I broke in. “What’s Bruce Applebury like?”

She considered silently before she answered. But there was nothing
about her unsmiling young face to suggest the sort of reverie a young
girl in love might be expected to fall into over such a question.

“I won’t try it,” she said at last. “It’s too important a subject.
You’ll see him anyhow in a day or two. I’ll bring him over and give you
a look.”

She wasn’t quite willing to let it go at that, however.

“He’s all right--abso_lute_ly.”

The mispronunciation was humorously meant, or, rather, was meant to
sound as if it were. But people with finely expressive voices like
Judy’s inevitably give themselves away. I stirred with an involuntary
protest. It was an outrage, marrying her off like that--a girl of
twenty--to a man she was not in love with.

She plunged into a detailed recital of the festivities, and never
paused until she got up to go.

“So you see all the fun you’re going to miss for having broken your
poor old leg? Oh, but your nose would have been out of joint anyway.
You were to have given me away, you know. But it seems it’s going to be
Uncle Alec.”

“Not Alexander Corbin!” I exclaimed. “Where in the world has he turned
up from?”

“From the Philippines, where he’s been all the time. Mother got a
telegram Saturday from San Francisco. That was something of a jolt too,
I expect. You’ll come over for the wedding itself, though, won’t you,
on Saturday afternoon--in a horse litter or a palanquin, or something?”

I told her I would.

In the doorway she paused for a comprehensive glance about the room.
“It’s a nice little room, isn’t it,” she said. “And a nice little
house. I’ve never been in here before.”

She paused a moment, then went on. “The horridest thing in the world,
I’m getting to think, is whitewash, and it’s going to be thick over at
The Oaks this week. I’m going to be coated with it. Come out looking
like a nice little plaster angel. Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d
like to poison your nurse, or something, and come down here and take
care of you--for the rest of this week.”

“And not get married at all?” I asked.

“They used to do that by proxy sometimes, didn’t they? I should think
that would be a good way to do it. Good-by. I suppose Punch left his
bicycle around here somewhere.”

I tried, after she’d gone, to make myself believe that there was
nothing to this but the modern young girl’s dread of seeming to be
the conventional blushing bride, but I couldn’t manage it. Punch’s
prediction that there was going to be big trouble before this business
was over stuck in my mind like a burr.




CHAPTER II

SHOAL WATER


Punch’s sense of duty condemned him to a rather dull day. He ate a
solitary lunch, for his mother hadn’t returned from town, and Judy
was apparently making a day of it with his bicycle. He spent several
uneventful hours wandering over the house, watching workmen and
servants going about their duty, but without detecting anything that
looked suspicious. Of course he couldn’t be everywhere at once.

The Oaks is an enormous house; old, as such matters are reckoned out
in this part of the world. It was built about fifty years ago, of dark
red brick with Gothic trimmings in wood, three stories high, and a
nervous-looking, high peaked roof on top of that.

Structurally it hasn’t been altered very much, save for additional
bathrooms, the installation of electric lights and an elaborate
system of burglar alarms. The place is a regular fort. One incongruous
innovation, namely an elevator, was necessitated by old Mrs. Corbin’s
illness. She might, of course, have moved down to rooms on the ground
floor, but she wasn’t willing to do that. She said she’d lived in those
rooms ever since she came to the house as a bride and she was going to
die in them. She’d have found it unendurable, too, no doubt, to give up
the possibility of visiting any room in her house; seeing to it that
the house-maids did their duty.

It abounded, of course, in odd, unused and half-forgotten nooks and
crannies. On a rainy day Punch found endless enjoyment in exploring
these, and he probably knew more about the house, little of his life as
he had spent in it, than anybody else, his grandmother included.

The old lady appeared for the first time that day about four o’clock.
She impressed Punch as unusually bright, and in the main, good-humored,
although her dismissal of poor Miss Digby at sight of him was brusk,
and her comments on his mother’s continued absence decidedly caustic.
She put him in charge of her wheel chair, and elected to make a tour
of the house to see how things were going. There were still workmen on
every floor, but it began to look as if they were going to finish in
time.

From the wheel chair she allotted the rooms for her expected guests,
from memory. Although she forgot some of them, and her plans had to be
heavily revised, it struck the boy as a remarkable evidence, not only
of her disposition to run things, but of her ability to do so. His
mother wouldn’t have been capable of it, he felt pretty sure. But of
course she’d never have tried to do it without a list.

The outline of the scheme was simple enough. The unmarried men, groom,
best man, ushers and odd relations, such as Punch’s mysterious Uncle
Alec, were to have the top floor. Punch’s own quarters were up there.
The middle of this story was a billiard room. It was surrounded by a
regular rabbit warren of bedrooms and the only daylight it got came
from a big window on the landing of the stairs.

Married couples, maiden aunts, bridesmaids and so on had their rooms on
floors below.

Punch found all these decisions and indecisions rather stupid--his
thoughts remained on the necklace--and when the tour of inspection was
finally finished and his grandmother returned to her own sitting-room,
he tactfully brought up the subject by asking her how old she supposed
the safe was and whether his grandfather had bought it. It was a rather
big old-fashioned affair of cast iron, lacquered, and with a picture of
a startled stag painted on the door--one of the first works of art that
Punch had ever admired.

“Yes, your grandfather bought it,” the old lady admitted. “And it’s a
good safe, too. They don’t make things as well as that now-a-days.”

“Perhaps not,” Punch agreed. “But I think they make them harder to
break into. I read in a magazine a while ago that any safe more than
ten years old might just as well be left unlocked, as far as burglars
were concerned.”

“Well, I don’t leave this one unlocked,” his grandmother said grimly,
“burglars or no. What are you getting at, you young rascal? Still
thinking about that necklace?”

Punch admitted that he was.

“Like a look at it?” she asked.

Would he!

He darted over to the safe. “Let me unlock it, Gran,” he pleaded. “Tell
me the combination. See if I can do it.”

“You let it alone,” she ordered. “I’ll do it myself.”

She began wheeling her chair across the room, but the next moment Punch
had turned the handle and pulled the great door open.

“Why, Gran,” he cried, horrified, “it wasn’t locked!”

The pearls, like all the other contents of the irregularly shelved,
cubby-holed place, were safe all right, and as soon as this had been
discovered to be a fact, the old lady tried hard to convince her
grandson that she had known that it was unlocked all the time. But he
knew that for a minute she had been absolutely incapacitated by terror,
and the look in her withered old face was one that he didn’t like to
remember. She had simply forgotten to lock the safe the last time
she’d gone to it. She was too badly shaken to do anything for herself.
Even after he’d found the long morocco covered box in the place she’d
indicated, she was too weak to press the spring that released the lid.

Punch found the pearls rather disappointing. They were beautiful, of
course. Big and round and handsome, and rather nice to touch. But as
anything to commit a crime for, or to pay a fortune for, he couldn’t
see it. He was too polite to express these opinions to his grandmother,
who he perceived was deeply moved by the sight of the thing.

She told him a long history of the necklace, the occasion of his
grandfather’s buying it, and the admiration it had excited on various
memorable occasions.

“Are you really going to give it to Judy?” he asked.

“What’s that about Judy?” she demanded.

She wasn’t deaf a bit, he was sure, but she often asked to have things
repeated. His theory of this was that it gave her more time to decide
what she wanted to say.

“It was in the paper yesterday,” he explained, “that you were going to
give the necklace to Judy for a wedding present.”

He extricated from his pocket the same damp wad of paper he had offered
for my inspection that morning. She didn’t pretend to read it, though.
Her vision wasn’t nearly so good as her hearing, and without her
spectacles, which she hated to wear, she couldn’t read at all.

“So they had it in the paper, did they?” she remarked. “Well, it’s an
amazing thing how much these newspaper reporters know. What has Judy
got to say about it?”

“She hasn’t said anything to me,” Punch told her.

“How about your mother? I dare say she had some ideas on the subject.”

“I haven’t seen mother,” Punch pointed out to her, “since she went to
town with Judy last week. But what I thought was that as long as it
_did_ come out in the paper, it would be better to hide these where no
one would think of looking for them, instead of leaving them in the
safe, which is the first place where any one would look. Especially
while there are so many people we don’t know around the house. I _know_
I could hide them, Gran, where they’d be safe.”

He had an idea that she was considering the proposal favorably. At any
rate she didn’t at once decline it. But in the middle of the silence
there came a light tap on the door.

Punch admits that he jumped a little himself, for they hadn’t heard
any footsteps. His grandmother started violently, then called, “Who’s
there?”

“It’s Victoria,” Punch heard his mother say. “May I come in?”

He thought his grandmother made a move to put the pearls back in the
safe, but she changed her mind, and answered rather sharply, “Yes, of
course. Come in.”

He thought the sight of the pearls surprised his mother.

“Letting Punch have a gloat over them, are you?” she said. “I’ve had
a frightful ride out from town. That’s a beastly train.--I suppose,”
she went on, reverting to the necklace, “that you’ve heard what was in
the paper. They say you’re going to give them to Judy for a wedding
present.”

“So Punch has just been telling me,” his grandmother remarked dryly.

She didn’t add anything to that, and Punch looked over at his mother.
He got the queer impression that she was holding her breath. She seemed
awfully tired and worried, anyway.

“Well,” she said at last, “I suppose that sort of irresponsibility is
what we have to expect from the papers.--Unless,” she went on jerkily,
after another pause, “this happens to be the truth.”

“I can make it the truth if I like,” the old woman said.

“Yes, of course,” his mother remarked. “No one questions that.”

Punch was getting uncomfortable. It’s horribly embarrassing to children
to be present when their elders quarrel, and of course he was sensitive
enough to feel electricity in the air. He brought the lightning down
upon himself.

“Well, they can’t be given to Judy if they’re stolen by a burglar
first,” he pointed out. “Won’t you let me have them, Gran, to hide for
you?”

She turned upon him furiously. “No, I will not! And I won’t be nagged
to death about them either, by you or by any one else.”

She whipped around on her daughter-in-law. “Why shouldn’t I give them
to Judy?” she demanded. “She’s my own granddaughter, isn’t she?”

“Judy says she doesn’t want them ...” his mother began.

But his grandmother pounced upon her again.

“You’ve been trying to talk her out of it, have you? So that you could
get them for yourself? Well, that settles it. She shall have them
whether she wants them or not. And once she’s married you’ll find her
husband will have something to say about what she does with them. I
won’t hear another word about them. Ring for Miss Digby, Punch.”

She wheeled her chair forward, restored the pearls to the safe, tugged
shut, with a good deal of trouble, the big iron door herself, waving
off their proffered assistance, and spun the combination knob.

“Don’t try to tell me I don’t keep this locked,” she said.

The thing that seemed to be puzzling Punch, when he reported the scene
to me, was his grandmother’s sudden change of mind about confiding the
pearls to him.

“I think she really meant to let me hide them,” he said. “Anyhow she
didn’t get mad when I suggested it the first time. But the second time
she pretty near blew me out of the room.”

I didn’t offer the boy the upshot of my own speculations, which was
that a sudden suspicion had sprung up in the old woman’s mind that
her grandson was in league with his mother, and that the original
suggestion, that he be given the pearls to hide, had come from her.

Punch didn’t see anything more of his mother that day, until he came
down into the drawing-room dressed for dinner, where he found her
talking to Judy. They went right on talking, somewhat enigmatically,
after they’d seen him come in, so he had felt entitled to listen and
make what he could of it.

They both looked as if the conversation had been rather exciting. But
Judy was speaking now more affectionately than was her wont. It was as
if they’d made up a quarrel about something.

“But of _course_ I will, mother! I understand, and I’ll do it exactly.
You leave it to me. I won’t give anybody a chance at it, old Eagle-Eye
or any one else. And please don’t bother about it, mother. It isn’t as
if I cared.”

“You’re a queer child,” her mother said. “Is it really true that you
don’t care?”

“Not the smallest conceivable--damn!” said Judy. She smiled a very
small smile, and added “I don’t know about Bruce, though. You may have
to square me with him.”

“You’ll have no trouble squaring yourself with him,” her mother told
her.

There must have been, Punch thought, some significance in the words
that Judy didn’t like, for she turned sharply away, and he saw that her
face had flushed.

But Uncle Alec came into the room just then and that talk was over.
He’d arrived only about an hour before.

Punch was inclined to approve of his long lost uncle. He was quite
jolly, and kept them entertained through what would otherwise have
been a pretty painful dinner, with Gran up at the head of the table
still in the frame of mind she’d been in after her quarrel with her
daughter-in-law. He told them about his tobacco plantation, and his
plans for growing rubber, and spun a few delightfully bloodcurdling
tales about Moros and Igorots.

Then, just as everything was going so well, he went off the deep end by
saying something about Judy’s necklace. He’d been reading yesterday’s
paper in the train.

Punch didn’t know how the quarrel flared up again. Everybody went on
trying to be polite for a while, but it wasn’t long before the fat
was in the fire. He fastened his eyes upon his plate and tried not to
listen to the blistering things his grandmother was saying. Uncle Alec
was horrified, of course. He did his best to pacify his mother, but
without avail. And finally Punch’s mother got up and left the room. He
wasn’t surprised. He only wondered that she’d stood it as long as she
did.

He didn’t see her again that evening, and when he came down to
breakfast next day Belden, the old butler, told him she’d gone to town
on the early train and was coming back with the guests on the special
car that afternoon.

She hated the journey to town, he knew, and he thought it rather funny
that she should undertake it again on a hot morning like this, the
very day that most of their guests, including the Applebury clan, were
coming down.

I silently agreed with him--more heartily than I was willing to admit.
There were several things that looked rather queer to me. I couldn’t
resist asking a question or two.

“Have you seen Judy this morning?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t seen anybody but Uncle Alec. He was down
to breakfast and we walked around the place for a while, afterward. He
asked me about a million questions. I like him, though.”

I wanted to know what he looked like.

“Oh, kind of peaceful and jolly. But he sees things quickly enough. I
told him about where Gran keeps the necklace. I sort of left him in
charge so that I could come over here.”

“You don’t think,” I hazarded, “that he was the person Judy meant by
‘old Eagle-Eye’?”

He looked rather thoughtful over that, but said he didn’t. “Somehow he
isn’t like that. Anyhow, I thought she was talking about the man she’s
going to marry--Bruce Applebury.”

This didn’t strike me as likely. The adjective old, for instance.
Applebury was under thirty. But then Judy, like Punch himself, wouldn’t
hesitate to apply it to any one over twenty-five.

I grew more apprehensive and indignant as I turned the matter over in
my mind after Punch had gone back--“on the job,” as he said. Victoria
was in shoal water of some sort. There couldn’t be any doubt of that.
Academically speaking, I was sorry for her. But I had no sympathy with
what seemed like an attempt to drag Judy into the breakers with her.

Oh yes, I’m sentimental about Judy. I may as well admit that at once.




CHAPTER III

FRUSTRATION OF PUNCH


None of the Corbins went down to the village, which is the better part
of two miles from The Oaks, to meet the train. Both Gran and Uncle Alec
seemed to think it rather queer that Judy didn’t plan to go, but she
explained her position with perfect lucidity.

“We’ve hardly been able to scrape up cars enough to bring them all out
in one trip. And mother will be there, of course, to do the arranging.”

“Won’t your young man feel a bit defrauded at not finding you there?”
Uncle Alec asked her.

“It’s hard to know about that,” Judy answered him thoughtfully. “That’s
another reason. You see, I don’t know whether he’d expect me to kiss
him on the station platform or not. I think it’s safer, on the whole,
to wait and do it here.”

The train happened to be late, and they waited quite a while--Gran,
Uncle Alec, Judy and Punch in the corner of one of the deep verandas
that commanded the drive. At last the first car appeared.

“There’s Bruce,” Judy said. “He’s the one in the front seat.”

She turned to her brother with a funny sort of smile, and added, “So it
looks as if it were really going to happen, Punch.”

He found, to his consternation, that he had a lump in his throat and he
turned away from her quickly to watch the approaching car. She’d upset
him horribly, somehow, looking at him like that. It seemed contrary to
the laws of nature that that rather good-looking, plump-faced, slightly
pompous grown-up could seriously be planning to carry Judy away to live
with him. Judy!

The boy’s impulse was to grab her by the arm, drag her around the
corner of the house, and bolt with her. Hide somewhere until the
excitement had blown over. There were plenty of girls whom no one would
miss who might be allowed to marry Mr. Applebury if they liked.

But Judy wouldn’t go with him, he realized, even if he did grab her
arm. She’d said good-by to him, somehow, in that one look.

He watched her as she moved off, composedly enough, to meet the car
under the porte-cochère. He saw Bruce spring spryly out; he heard
Judy’s short little laugh just before she kissed him. Then she turned
quickly and began greeting the others. Now they were all coming up into
the veranda together, toward the group of three that remained in the
corner.

A saving idea occurred to Punch. His grandmother’s room up-stairs had
been left unguarded now for a long while. Most of the servants were
having lunch; everybody else had been occupied expecting the arriving
guests. Sentry duty was his job now. He slipped around the corner of
the veranda, entered the house and stole swiftly up the stairs.

The upper hall was deserted. He tried the door to his grandmother’s
room. It wasn’t locked, and he went in, crossed over to the safe and
tried the door to that. It was locked all right, so he withdrew to the
hall again. Down at the end of it stood a big high-sided davenport.
It afforded an excellent post of observation, since by crouching down
in the lee of one of the great arms one could make one’s self highly
unnoticeable, almost invisible.

Through the open windows he could hear cars arriving, one after
another, and a steadily rising surge of voices. Sometimes he could
isolate Judy’s. Once or twice he heard her laugh. Still the cars kept
arriving. Lord, there were a lot of people! And there would be still
more to-morrow.

He stayed there for what seemed quite a long while, but it couldn’t
have been, really, because, of course, as soon as the baggage had come
up from the station, the servants would begin carrying up suit-cases
and things to the different rooms.

Presently he heard a step on the stair, coming up in a hurry but
quietly. Instantly he was at gaze, breathless to see who would appear
around the turn of the landing. It was Judy.

He’d have spoken to her if astonishment had not silenced him. Her face
was so white that the color she had put on it stood out unnaturally,
and her eyes were wild, like those of a frightened animal.

She looked right at him as she passed, and he thought at first she
hadn’t seen him at all. But when she went into her room she left the
door open behind her and called his name, not loud, but urgently.

“Come in,” she said, as he halted on the threshold, “and shut the door
after you.”

She had flung herself down on the bed. He stood awkwardly beside her,
not knowing what he ought to do. She wasn’t crying. He thought she must
be suddenly ill.

“Hadn’t I better call mother?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Don’t call anybody. Don’t do anything. Just stay here
a few minutes until I have had time to think. Sit down and give me
something to hold on to. It’s rocking like a boat.”

She clutched the hand he gave her with a strength that hurt, and the
coldness of hers frightened him. But he obeyed her literally and didn’t
try to talk, let alone ask questions.

Presently her grip relaxed and her eyes steadied themselves. Evidently
the rocking wasn’t quite so bad. She had a queer look in her face,
though there was nothing you could call it but a smile. And then
suddenly her eyes filled up with tears and she began to cry. She buried
her face in a pillow in order to make no noise, and sobbed and shook.
But this somehow didn’t distress him as much as the smile had done.

The crying didn’t last very long, and when it was finished and she
looked up at him again and said shakily, “I’m all right now,” he
perceived that this was true.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’ve got to think
and I can’t, yet. Punch, are you for me? Are you on my side whatever
happens--whatever I do?”

“Sure I am!” he told her.

“Sure you are!” she said, and sitting up suddenly, she kissed him in
the sort of brief, business-like way that was her fashion.

Then she dropped back again on the pillow.

“Why, this is what happened,” she went on, after a thoughtful silence.
“You’re to go down now and tell them all about it. I slipped on a
rug, down there in the hall, and turned my ankle, quite hard. And I’m
up here now in my bathroom putting it in hot water so it won’t be
swollen--for the wedding, you know. And I shan’t be able to play tennis
this afternoon, or swim either, I suppose. But otherwise I’m quite all
right. You don’t mind being a liar, do you, Punch, in a good cause?”

He told her he didn’t.

“Where did you disappear to when the crowd came?” she asked him
suddenly. “You were there just the minute before.”

“Oh, I was sort of keeping an eye on things,” he told her.
“Grandmother’s room, you know. On account of the necklace.”

She gave a rather sudden laugh at that, and told him he had that
necklace on the brain.

“Forget it!” she commanded him. “Go down and meet the Appleburys. But
don’t forget about my ankle.”

Punch got down-stairs in time to find the crowd on the veranda in the
act of dispersal to their rooms. He gave Judy’s message to his mother,
and it had, of course, the effect of checking, for a few minutes, the
movement indoors. People crowded around, plying him for details, and
passing the news along.

He was a little uneasy at first from the impression that he had seen a
flicker of incredulity in his mother’s eye, but elsewhere belief seemed
instantaneous. He avoided elaborating the story, though. He knew only
what Judy had told him. He added one small lie of his own. He said he
hadn’t seen the ankle himself. She’d been talking to him through the
bathroom door.

It was hard luck, they all felt, but there was nothing to be done about
it. They might as well go in and dress for tennis or riding, or just
lounging about. Punch was requisitioned as usher to show people where
their rooms were.

When he had personally conducted a good many of them and the rush was
over, he came down-stairs from the third floor to find a man he hadn’t
previously seen, standing about indecisively in the second-floor hall.

“I seem to have got lost,” he said to the boy. “I’m William Grant, a
cousin of Bruce Applebury. You’re Punch, aren’t you?”

Punch said he was, and took the hand the man held out to him.

“Why, you’re up in what we call The Club,” he said. “That’s on the next
floor. I’ll show you.”

“I don’t believe that’s necessary,” the man protested. “I think I can
find it if you’ll tell me.”

“Oh, no,” Punch insisted. “I’ll show you. Come along.”

He was deeply perplexed as he turned to mount the stairs. There was
nothing queer of course about his having failed to see the man in the
crowd on the veranda. There was no reason to doubt his being a wedding
guest. He looked like a person who would be one. Punch had liked his
looks instantly. He looked sort of lazy, and yet alert too, and as if
he was the kind of person that could understand things.

But what he hadn’t in the least looked like, in the moment when Punch
first glimpsed him in the hall, was a man who had lost his way and was
looking for the door of his own room. It had looked more like waiting
than looking. A rather exciting sort of waiting, too.

Had he been a little reluctant to accept Punch’s guidance? Hadn’t he
hung back a little, for one last glance around that hall that Gran’s
door opened into?

This must have been pure imagination on Punch’s part. There was
no mystery about the man’s identity at all events. He was Bruce
Applebury’s cousin, all right.

The Club was what they called an irregular suite of three or four
bedrooms and a bath, opening through a tiny vestibule of its own
into the billiard room. As Punch opened the door and conducted the
man in, they saw the prospective bridegroom, already stripped to his
underclothes, and getting out of them for his bath.

Punch had to revise one of his estimates immediately. There was nothing
fat or soft about Judy’s fiancé. What gave him that stout look was
clear muscle. He was a much more impressive and formidable-looking
figure like this than when he was covered up with clothes.

“Where in the world have you been?” he said to Punch’s charge.

“Got lost,” the other said cheerfully. “Punch, here, rescued me.”

“Well, look alive,” Bruce commanded, “if you’re going to play tennis.”

“I’m not,” his cousin told him. “Changed my mind.”

“How’s Judy?” Bruce asked Punch. “Has she come out yet?”

Punch said he didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen her, anyhow.

“It’s a shame you won’t be able to see her play, Bill. Her form’s
simply immense, and she gets around the court like a little wildcat.”

Punch knew he didn’t like Bruce Applebury when he heard him say this.
He was talking already as if he owned her. And what was rather strange,
he got the impression that Bill Grant didn’t like it very well either.

He was feeling rather silly as he came down-stairs from The Club over
having doubted Bill Grant’s authenticity as a cousin of the bridegroom
and having almost suspected him of being a burglar. He had half a mind
to try to do as Judy had commanded and forget the necklace. But to his
orderly young mind this would have been impossible. He simply couldn’t
leave loose ends.

So he crossed to his grandmother’s door and knocked lightly. He didn’t
suppose she was there, for she seldom came down-stairs but once before
dinner. He just wanted to make sure, once more, that everything was
all right. He was on the point of letting himself in, since no voice
answered his knock, when he heard footsteps. The door was opened,
and he was confronted by Miss Digby. She had a sort of harassed,
interrupted air as she opened the door, and it changed to something
like exasperation when she saw who the visitor was.

“What do you want?” she demanded. She didn’t offer to let him in.

“Nothing,” he told her truthfully. “I just wanted to make sure that
everything was all right.”

“Oh, Punch,” she cried, “go away! Stop bothering about that necklace.
Your grandmother’s just come up to lie down. She’s going to rest until
dinner time. The strain of meeting so many people was a little too much
for her. So don’t be a nuisance if you can help it.”

“All right,” he said, “I won’t,” and she closed the door.

He hung about the upper hall for a little while hoping, since Judy’s
door was half open, that she would come out, but she didn’t, so he went
forlornly out to the court.

His spirits came up, little by little, out here in the sunshine. There
was a lot of good fast tennis. Applebury played insatiably; a hard,
wary, efficient sort of game. It was evident he loved it. Punch kept an
eye open for Bill Grant, who he hoped would appear among the onlookers,
but in this he was disappointed.

He saw him later, though, at the pool, when the tennis was over.
Everybody went in then, including Punch himself. Judy, with a cane, and
a good big bandage showing through her stocking, came down to watch the
sport. She gave so good an imitation of a girl with a damaged ankle
that Punch found himself wondering whether perhaps it hadn’t been true
that she’d slipped on the rug. And certainly there seemed to be nothing
now the matter with her spirits. He was heavily at a discount with
himself as a detective when he went into the house to dress for dinner.

This didn’t take him long--all his movements are singularly neat and
swift--and he was the first person to come down from the top floor.

His grandmother’s door was open now and when he paused there a moment
she called to him to come in. She was dressed for dinner and all ready
for her ride down in the elevator. She struck him, just as she had
on her first appearance the day before, as being rather unusually
bright-looking somehow. And again almost unnaturally amiable.

“How about it, Punch?” she asked. “Shall we give your sister something
to make up to her for her bad ankle? Nobody will look at her ankles
if she has the pearls around her neck. Why shouldn’t she wear them
to-night? Give that bridegroom of hers a treat. Let him see what he’s
going to get.”

Punch was moved to protest. “I sort of don’t think she’d want to
wear them to-night,” he said. “It’s nearly two whole days before the
wedding.”

“Go and call her,” his grandmother commanded, starting to wheel herself
over to the safe. “No, don’t stop to help me. I don’t need it. Go tell
your sister as soon as she’s dressed to come to me.”

Punch went on the errand a little reluctantly, and gave the message to
Judy through the door.

He meant to dart back to his grandmother’s room in time to see her open
the safe. He was curious as to whether this time it was locked or not.
But Judy detained him.

“I’ll go now,” she said. “I’m dressed all but my dress, and I don’t
want to put that on till it’s time to go down to dinner. Come in here a
minute.”

She was putting on, as he entered the room, some sort of kimono-like
garment of orange-colored silk. But she arrested the action to laugh at
the sight of him.

“You look so nice and innocent, with your hair brushed,” she
explained, and having her arms in her sleeves by this time, she came
over and hugged him. “Oh, Punch, you’re a dear,” she cried. “You made
an instantaneous hit this afternoon. Do you know that?”

It wasn’t the caress that made him uncomfortable, nor yet the
compliment. It was the sort of wildness there was about her look.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she went on, still holding him
by the shoulders and looking at him very intently. “I don’t know that
it matters--much--what does. Only--you haven’t forgotten what you said
this afternoon? You’re on my side, you know.”

He told her that he was and that he hadn’t forgotten.

“All right,” she said. “Come along to grandmother. Do you know what she
wants?”

He was afraid, somehow, that if he told her she’d refuse, so instead
of answering her question he reminded her that she was starting off
without her cane. She laughed and darted across the room to get it.
Then, with her arm through his, she limped decorously down the hall to
her grandmother’s room.

The old lady had opened the safe door, and had the brown morocco case
in her lap.

“That isn’t your dinner dress, is it?” she complained at sight of her
granddaughter. “I sent word you were to come when you were dressed. I
wanted to see how you’d look in the pearls. However, now you’re here,
you may as well put them on.”

Punch had been watching his sister, for the sight of the morocco case
in his grandmother’s lap had convinced him that everything was all
right. He saw her eyes widen a little.

At the same moment his grandmother uttered a wheezy sort of shriek. He
turned and looked. The box she held in her hand was empty.

“Shut the door!” Judy commanded, and his prompt obedience came none too
soon, for with the old woman’s next breath she cried out, full voice,
“They’re gone. She’s taken them. Your mother’s taken them.”

“Are they _really_ gone?” Judy asked.

Then to Punch’s amazement she began to laugh.




CHAPTER IV

SOMETHING BEHIND


I had three visitors that evening. Punch was the first. He ditched the
dinner at The Oaks and rode over on his bicycle in time to dine with
me--to go through the motions of dining with me, rather, for he ate
hardly anything.

He was, of course, terribly cast down by the loss of the necklace which
he had tried so conscientiously to guard. He felt, too, that if the
others had treated the case as seriously as he had done, it needn’t
have happened. They hadn’t treated it seriously, none of them, with the
exception of Uncle Alec. They’d laughed at him for having the necklace
on the brain. They’d implored him to forget it and not be a pest.

He didn’t, though, entirely acquit himself of negligence. That
half-hour or more while they had waited in the veranda for the arrival
of the guests, he himself with the others, might have given the
thief, assuming that he’d secreted himself in the house at some time
previously, his opportunity. And this was just the time, Punch said,
when he should have been on the job.

“Oh, come!” I protested. “There were plenty of other chances for the
thing to be taken. You couldn’t have stayed on guard all the time.”

He insisted with a vehemence which didn’t strike me as quite like him
that this was when the necklace had disappeared.

“The necklace is known to have been seen,” I argued, “by nobody since
your grandmother showed it to you yesterday afternoon. She put it back
in the safe and locked it up. It seems to me our difficulty is that
there have been so many chances to take it.”

“For who to take it?” he asked me.

“Why, for almost anybody who was in the house,” I said.

A queer look went over his face, as if that off-hand remark of mine had
frightened him.

“Not for any one who _would_ take it,” he said. “Of course there were
chances for people who wouldn’t.”

At that I got an idea. I asked him suddenly, “How do you know that the
necklace has really been taken? Your grandmother sprang the loss of it
on you and Judy in a rather dramatic way. Isn’t it possible that she
adopted your idea that the jewels ought to be hidden somewhere rather
than kept in the safe? She’d been rather annoyed at your insistence
that they oughtn’t to be in the safe, although she’d become convinced,
more or less, that you were right about it. She’d been still more
annoyed at Judy for saying she didn’t want the necklace.

“Well, then, she sends you to get Judy, opens the safe, tucks the
pearls away somewhere--in her own dress perhaps--and then springs the
empty box on the pair of you. Isn’t that possible? She has guarded
against their being stolen, and she’s scored off you and Judy at the
same time.”

“She wasn’t paying any attention to Judy and me. She didn’t even notice
that Judy laughed. She was screaming that mother had taken them.
Practically out of her head. Miss Digby had to give her a hypodermic to
quiet her.”

That shattered my theory. It had been no joke, even of the grimmest,
for the old woman. But my mind had already fastened on something else.

“Judy laughed, you say, when she saw that the necklace was gone?”

He hadn’t told me that before.

“Yes,” he said.

I remarked that it was natural enough that she should be a bit
hysterical for the moment after a loss of that kind.

“That wasn’t the _way_ she laughed,” he told me. “She laughed as if it
was something that didn’t matter very much, but was rather funny. As if
she was really thinking about something else. But I don’t know why she
laughed nor what the other thing was she was thinking about.”

His voice had faltered, but he had forced it to the end of the
sentence, and I perceived what I might have guessed earlier. The thing
the boy was agonizing over lay deeper than the disappearance of the
necklace, although behind it perhaps, and connected with it.

“Well,” I said cheerfully, “we know Judy didn’t steal the necklace
anyway, nor your mother, either. Go back to the time the people came
and tell me everything that’s happened.”

It steadied him to have a piece of perfectly straight reporting like
that to do; something that called the faculties of his active, orderly
mind into play, and he went ahead and gave me the narrative of the
afternoon, substantially as I have put it down in the preceding
chapter. I didn’t interrupt him with questions. But when he had
finished I asked a few.

“Miss Digby wouldn’t have stayed in the room while your grandmother was
lying down, would she?”

“Not in her bedroom,” he said. “But it’s her sitting-room next door
where the safe is. I thought she was going to stay in the sitting-room,
but I’m not sure she did.”

“If she went away,” I pointed out, “there’d have been a chance for
some one to open the safe if it weren’t locked, or to unlock it if he
knew the combination, and get the necklace while your grandmother was
asleep. For that matter, isn’t it likely that Miss Digby knows the
combination to the safe herself? She must have seen your grandmother
open it a hundred times.”

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose she does.” Then he laughed. “Old Digs didn’t
take the necklace though,” he said.

I agreed with him about that. It wasn’t possible seriously to suspect
Miss Digby.

“I’m not talking about the probability that any one stole it,” I
explained. “I’m trying to include all the people who had a chance to
take the necklace at that time.”

“Well,” he said, “if Digs went out, everybody who was in the house had
a chance.”

“Including,” I remarked, “your assumed thief who had concealed himself
somewhere on the premises.”

“It wouldn’t have been so good a chance for him as the other time,” he
insisted, “because Judy was right there in her room across the hall,
and her door was open when Miss Digby sent me away. Besides, there were
a lot of people down-stairs all the rest of the afternoon. He’d have
had trouble getting away without meeting anybody.”

“What are they doing about it?” I asked. “How many people know the
necklace is gone?”

“Only mother and Uncle Alec, besides Gran and Judy and me. Oh, and
Digs, of course. I went and got mother and she sent me for Uncle Alec.
They jawed about it, there in grandmother’s room, until it was time to
go down to dinner.”

“Didn’t your grandmother herself have anything to say about it?”

“Oh, she was in bed in the next room. The hypodermic put her out, I
guess. It was mostly mother and Uncle Alec. He’s awfully excited about
it. Wants to send for detectives. But mother won’t have it.”

“How about Judy?” I asked. “You’d think her vote would count, as long
as it was to have been her necklace.”

“Judy didn’t vote. She didn’t seem to care what they did. It seemed
as if she was still thinking about something else. I don’t think she
wanted the police, though.”

“What do _you_ want?” I asked.

The intensity of his answer startled me.

“I don’t care much about the necklace now,” he said, “but I want the
thief found. _I’m_ not afraid who it’ll turn out to be.”

“You mean,” I asked, “that you think your mother and Judy _are_ afraid?”

He looked at me steadily but did not answer.

Possibly to his relief, and certainly to my own, we heard a car door
slam just then, and Punch darted to the window to see who it was.

“Here’s mother now,” he said, and went to open the door for her.

I couldn’t see her face when she perceived her small son, but of course
I heard what she said to him.

“Oh, you’re here, are you? We were wondering what had become of you.”

Her tone was composed, almost good-natured, but rather cold. My guess
is she was glad she was saved the trouble of telling me what had
happened, but at the same time a little put out by this indication that
I was deep in Punch’s confidence. He was always rather reticent with
her.

After she’d come into my sitting-room and greeted me, she turned back
to him. “Run along home now,” she said curtly, “and tell Judy I’ll be
back in fifteen minutes.”

He obeyed her with alacrity; he barely nodded a farewell to me as he
said, “All right, mother,” and disappeared. If he felt any curiosity as
to our interview, he didn’t show it. I think he was glad just then not
to talk to her.

She did the polite thing by my broken leg, helped herself, at my
invitation, to one of my cigarettes, and settled down, with a
deep-drawn, very audible sigh, in the big chair which Punch had just
vacated.

“I suppose you know,” she said, “the ghastly thing that’s just happened
over at The Oaks?”

“I know as much about it as Punch knows,” I said somewhat tentatively.

As a matter of fact, Victoria herself had astonished me. For in spite
of her sigh and her use of the word ghastly to describe the theft, her
manner was almost complacent.

It seemed incredible that this should be so, but there was no getting
away from it. The mental picture I’d formed of her during the past
couple of days, derived mostly from the reports I’d been getting from
Punch, had been of a woman driven half frantic by worry, involved in
some sort of dangerous web.

The web appeared, certainly, to be woven about the necklace. She had,
according to Judy, sustained a shock when she read in the paper that it
was to be given to her daughter as a wedding present. She’d quarreled
furiously with old Mrs. Corbin about it. It had caused--apparently,
at least, it was the thing that had caused--sudden alterations in
her plans. I had taken for granted, though on insufficient evidence
perhaps, that it was the theme of that mysteriously emotional
conversation with Judy, which Punch had heard the end of, on the night
of Alexander Corbin’s arrival.

Yet now, within a couple of hours of the discovered theft of the
precious dangerous thing, she sat there looking at me as calm and
contented as a cat who had just licked the meringue off the top of a
lemon pie! Oh, I exaggerate, of course. One does with Victoria.

“I wonder if you _do_ know as much as Punch knows,” she remarked,
thoughtfully exhaling a deep lungful of smoke. “Oh, I suppose so,
though Alec had the idea that Punch might have taken it himself.--Not
to keep, of course,” she added hastily, “but perhaps as a prank to
teach his grandmother a lesson. Or to save it from being stolen by
burglars.”

Victoria went down to her nadir with me just then. I’ve never found it
harder to keep up the appearance of friendliness.

“For that matter,” I said, “I may have taken the thing myself. Gone
over on crutches in my sleep....”

“That is possible,” she interrupted, with a sudden look of interest.
“Oh, not you. Punch! I don’t _think_ he ever has walked in his sleep.
He may have done it this time, though. That necklace has been an
obsession with him for days.”

There was no denying, of course, that this was a possibility. But
Victoria didn’t pursue it.

“I’ll tell you why I came,” she went on, laying down her cigarette and
coming a little more sharply into focus. “Alec is acting rather stupid
about this and stubborn. He gets that from his mother, I guess. He’s
determined to make a hullabaloo about it. Send for detectives, question
the servants, search everybody, and that sort of thing. Judy and I have
done all we could to call him off, without getting anywhere. He feels
his responsibility, he says, as the man of the family. All I could
get him to agree to was to wait until he’d talked to you. He’s in the
dining-room now smoking with the men, but he’s coming over to see you
as soon as he can get away.”

“And _you_ want me to persuade him to do nothing,” I said.

I didn’t inflect it like a question. Cowardice that was, I’ll admit.
And Victoria assumed that I would do as she wished. It is an assumption
she always makes with men, I think.

“Of course,” she went on petulantly, “I don’t know whether it will do
any good. There’ll be my mother-in-law to reckon with as soon as she
comes out of the hypodermic Miss Digby gave her. I want Alec on our
side, actively, you know, before that happens.”

“Yes,” I said faintly, “I see.”

Then I rallied my courage. I admit it was the memory of what Punch had
said--“I want the thief caught. I’m not afraid who it’ll turn out to
be”--which served as my trumpet call.

“Look here, Victoria. There may be a reason why I should try to
persuade Alexander Corbin to let the necklace go and keep the theft
dark, but I won’t undertake it unless I know what the reason is.”

She looked at me a little ruefully. “You never did like me very well,”
she remarked.

“I think I can fairly be counted one of your friends,” I told her, “and
I think I’ve understood pretty well some of your difficulties. I really
want to help you now. But I can’t step off in the dark. I want to know
why the thing Alec proposes isn’t the natural thing to do; the thing
I’d do myself in the circumstances. He _has_ got a responsibility in
the matter, and I don’t wonder that he feels it.”

“Oh, I suppose so,” she agreed.

I looked up at her and saw, to my astonishment, that there were tears
in her eyes.

“You talk about my difficulties. You _don’t_ know them; not the
beginning of them. I’ve been trying for the last ten years to give my
children the sort of bringing up they deserve to have. It’s the only
thing I’ve cared anything about. That’s true, whether you believe it or
not. And I’ve been hampered and suspected and quarreled with all the
time by that terrible old woman who’s my mother-in-law.

“I suppose I’ve made mistakes. We all do. But between her and the
children I’ve been driven half distracted. Not Punch. He’s all right.
But there have been times when I’ve been in despair about Judy.”

“Isn’t she pretty young to have been despaired about?” I protested.

“She ran away from school last fall,” said Victoria. “I wonder if even
_you_ had heard about that? She simply disappeared for almost a month.
There, I’m glad I told you. You’ll have some idea....”

“Good heavens!” I broke in. “Didn’t you hear from her in all that time?
How did you know she hadn’t been kidnapped--murdered?”

“I got a line from her every two or three days, post-marked from
different places, saying she was all right and telling me not to worry.”

“But how did she live?” I asked. “What had she to live on?”

“She earned it,” Victoria said shortly. “You may be perfectly sure I
haven’t asked for details. But she’s volunteered a few. I know she
worked for a while as a waitress in a cheap lunch room.”

“How did you get her back?”

“Oh, she’d had enough of it, I suppose. She wrote me that if I wanted
her to come back she was ready to behave herself. I met her in New
York. Found her in the Martha Washington Hotel, fitted her out with
clothes, and took her, by a lucky chance, down to Belleair.”

“What did she look like--when you found her, I mean?”

“She looked,” Victoria said dryly, “as if she hadn’t found liberty
quite so jolly as she’d expected.”

“What was the particular piece of luck about your choosing Belleair?”

“Why, Bruce was down there playing golf,” she said. “And it just
happened she got him. Of course if he’d known.... But there’s no reason
why he ever should. So now she’s all right. She’s marrying a man--an
orphan, thank heaven!--who’s well-bred and decently rich, and mad about
her.”

“Is she in love with him?” I asked.

“No,” Victoria admitted, “I don’t suppose she is. But she likes him,
and she wants to marry him. She’s going into it with her eyes open. And
not under any pressure from me. I didn’t urge it on her. Anyhow, that’s
_settled_. She’s going to marry him day after to-morrow.

“Well, I’m not going to have her wedding spoiled by exploding a beastly
thing like this in the middle of it.”

“There’s nothing beastly about getting robbed of a necklace,” I said.
“That can happen to anybody.”

She flung out her hands in a gesture of uncontrollable exasperation.
Then she pulled herself together.

“The first discovery a detective would make would be that Mrs. Corbin
is a morphine addict. That would be rather unsavory, wouldn’t it?”

“She gets the stuff legitimately, doesn’t she?” I commented. “Nobody
as old and rich as that could be reduced to trafficking with a peddler.”

“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “Doctor Parkinson prescribes it for her. But
isn’t that bad enough? Bruce would hate it--just the notoriety--worse
than anybody I know. Things like that simply don’t happen in his
family. He’d think less of Judy if it happened in hers.”

She paused a moment; then went on with a rush. “If this meant the
actual loss of the necklace itself, I’d let it go; let the thief make
what he could out of it--rather than turn Judy’s wedding into a beastly
dime novel of a detective story. Have it smeared all over the front
pages of the newspapers. Isn’t that reason enough why Alec shouldn’t
tell the world with a bang what’s happened?”

She could hardly have been aware of what she had said, for she started
when I quoted her own words back at her.

“You said just now that even if it really meant the loss of the
necklace you’d let it go. Do you mean that it doesn’t mean that?”

She took her time before answering. “I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t,”
she said.

“Do you _know_ where the necklace is now, Victoria?”

“No,” she said hotly, “of course I don’t. Not exactly. But I’m
absolutely sure that it’s all right.”

“How about Judy?” I asked. “Does she agree with you, genuinely, that
it’s best to do nothing about it?”

Victoria gave me a rather dry smile. “Judy does,” she said. “You may be
perfectly sure of that. Call her up on the phone if you like and ask
her.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it. And I’ll do what I can to
bring Alexander around to your way of thinking.”

She nodded and got up to go, without, I’m glad to say, embarrassing me
by any overwhelming manifestations of gratitude. I wasn’t enthusiastic
over what I’d let myself in for.

I didn’t believe Victoria was as sure as she pretended to be that
the necklace would turn up all right. The start of interest she had
betrayed over the idea that Punch might have taken it while walking
in his sleep had looked genuine, and Victoria never was much of an
actress. If it was genuine, it revealed two things. First, that she
hadn’t carried off the necklace herself on that hurried trip to town
yesterday, and second, that she didn’t know who had taken it. All she
had was a theory, but it must be one in which she felt a good deal of
confidence.

Whom could that theory concern? It seemed to narrow itself down to
Judy. A reduction to absurdity, of course. Why should Judy steal the
necklace which her grandmother meant to give her for a wedding present?
And yet, why had Judy faked a sprained ankle? Why had she asked her
brother whether he’d be on her side whatever she did? Why had she
laughed in that queer way when she saw the empty box from which the
necklace had been taken?

My belief in the child’s honor, in her essential straightness, was
impregnable. It had not been in the least shaken by Victoria’s account
of her escapade last fall, the running away from the school she had
hated--earning her own living by being a waitress in a quick lunch.
Good lord!

I could understand her doing that, though. What was harder to
understand was her sudden surrender. It wasn’t like Judy to come to
heel just because she’d found that liberty wasn’t quite what it was
cracked up to be. Something worse than that must have happened to her.
Whatever had happened, though, even if she’d got involved in devious
ways, I was sure they weren’t of her seeking. I felt about this present
business much as Punch did. I wanted the thief caught; the air, so
sultry with mystery and suspicion, cleared by a good fresh wind.

And yet I had just given Victoria my promise to do what I could to help
hush things up. Why the devil had I done that? Well, I knew why. It
was because, when she had said that her children were all in the world
that she really cared anything about, I had believed she was telling
the truth. All the same I didn’t relish the prospect of my talk with
Alexander Corbin.

That, however, came off better than I had anticipated. I found I liked
him, just as Punch had done. And he showed no trace of the stubbornness
of which Victoria had accused him. He seemed to me extraordinarily
open-minded, and he carried the virtue of candor further than I’d have
been able to do myself, I think, in similar circumstances.

I remembered him faintly, as one would remember the younger brother of
a boyhood friend, and by way of putting some feeling of cordiality
into my greeting, I told him so, without the qualifications.

“That’s nice of you,” he said. “But you wouldn’t have recognized me if
you’d met me on the street.”

“No,” I admitted, “I don’t suppose I should.”

“Well, there you are!” he said. “I doubt if anybody would. I’m all
but a total stranger. And I find myself in the middle of a family
snarl like this. I come on here for my niece’s wedding, and within
twenty-four hours a highly portable piece of my mother’s property,
worth perhaps a hundred thousand dollars, disappears.”

“Good God!” I cried. “You aren’t trying to tell me that any one
suspects _you_ of having taken it?”

“That’s very polite of you,” he remarked kindly, “but I don’t see why
they shouldn’t. It’s evident that Victoria and Judy both regard it as
an inside job of some sort. And surely I’ve a more obvious motive,
as they say in detective stories, for taking it than any one else in
the family. I quarreled with my mother pretty near thirty years ago;
I’ve come home at last to make it up; I find her so shaken by age
and--infirmity that it’s very doubtful if any new will she made now
would hold water,--and I steal the necklace by way of getting my share
of the estate.

“It’s all rot, of course, but that’s how it looks. What I’d like to do
is to put a cordon around the house and have everybody in it searched,
beginning with me and Applebury’s maiden aunts. I want it found, if
it involves tearing the plaster off the walls. Of course it isn’t
possible to go to such lengths as that, but it seems as if one might do
something.

“Yet here’s Victoria pleading with me to let it ride; not turn a hand
nor say a word. She seems to think she knows where it is, or at all
events, that it will turn up. Well, that’s all right if she’s got the
correct hunch. But suppose she hasn’t? I’ll feel uncommonly flat facing
my mother to-morrow when she comes out of the effect of the stuff
they’ve given her, if I have to tell her that the necklace hasn’t been
heard from, and that I’ve done nothing toward recovering it.”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “that you haven’t done the best thing possible
toward recovering it.”

He looked at me with a stare of surprise. “You mean by doing nothing,
by saying nothing?” he asked. “That’s what you must mean, of course,
because that’s all I’ve done. But I’m not sure that I see how you
figure it out. Effect of suspense and uncertainty--that sort of thing?
Psychology getting in its deadly work?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Well, it won’t, and I’ll tell you why. A thing like that can’t be
kept dark. It’s known already--half known. Things like that get passed
around. I could feel it crackling all around the dinner table to-night.
By morning everybody in the house will know that something’s happened.
And Victoria might as well have let me call the police in the first
place.”

“No,” I insisted. “There’s a difference between knowing a thing that’s
admitted and knowing a thing that’s not admitted. Society--with a big
S--lives on that difference. We never call anybody a liar. We go on
acting as if we believed the official version of things until the facts
fairly stare us down.”

He laughed. “That statement is true,” he said, “and it’s equally true
of the Moro chieftains in the island of Mindanao.”

“All right,” I said. “Now consider this. There are three sorts of
persons in that house: family, guests and servants. They’re all going
to stay until after the wedding, day after to-morrow. There’s no reason
why anybody should leave, at least, and if anybody does, on whatever
pretext, he’ll be under heavy suspicion. But it’s not likely that the
person who took the necklace will try to leave. The hullabaloo and the
breaking up of the party is very likely just what he’s hoping for. But
nothing happens. Nothing’s said. And the inference from that is that
some one’s been found out. That we know and therefore we can afford to
wait. So there’s a pretty good chance that the thief, so to speak, will
take his first opportunity to restore the necklace.”

“That’s ingenious,” he was polite enough to say. “But I confess the
strong-arm method appeals to me rather more.”

“It can’t be applied,” I said. “A search is no good unless you search
everybody.”

“That’s what I want,” he insisted. “That’s exactly what I mean.
Everybody.”

“Including your mother?” I asked.

Again I encountered his quick intense stare. It wasn’t hostile, though.
He was thinking, hard.

“You’re right,” he said. “That can’t be done.”

He seemed to be coming around all right by himself, so I let him alone.
There was a ruminative silence between us for a while.

“That’s a nice little niece of mine,” he said at last. “Hard to realize
she’s getting married, though. I wish I knew her better.”

“What do you think of her young man?” I asked.

“Oh, a perfectly sound fellow, I think,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“No mistaking his type. He’s what he is, plain as a flagstaff. Great on
discipline and exercise. Plays a very good game of bridge and takes it
as seriously as he does the Constitution of the United States. He’ll
have a thick neck by the time he’s forty, and be one of the pillars
of an intensely respectable club. Seems like rather a sledge-hammer,
though, for little Judy.”

“Is that at all the way she feels, do you think?” I asked.

He was properly non-committal about that. “Oh, don’t ask me,” he said.
“The etiquette is so different from what it was in my day. Then a
young couple like that would have played up--held hands, slunk off by
themselves whenever they got a chance. I’ve hardly seen these two
together since he got here. That’s the modern manner, I suppose.”

I’d been thinking over what Punch had told me of the arrival of the
guests. There had been nothing unnatural about Judy’s greeting of her
fiancé or of the others who came down from the station in the same car
with him. Punch had spoken of hearing her laugh two or three times
after he’d taken his sentry post on the davenport up-stairs. Whatever
had happened to her had happened after that.

“Is there anybody in the crowd that came down on the special car,”
I asked, “anybody who arrived at The Oaks later than Bruce did, who
has--well, attracted your attention in any way? Anybody who seemed to
have any special effect on Judy?”

For the third time he turned upon me that intense stare of his.

“No,” he said, “I can’t say there is. I don’t know why you asked me
that, but I’ll tell you this. I happened to be looking at her--it’s
the natural thing to do--and I saw her face change. I couldn’t say
now whether it was with pleasure or the reverse. She was looking past
me. Then she turned with a sort of gasp, and bolted into the house.
It must have been just then that she hurt her ankle. I know I turned
around to try to see who or what she’d been looking at, but I didn’t
make anything of it. It was something, though, or somebody.”

I nodded. “That’s it,” I said. “There’s something behind, that Judy and
her mother know more about than we do. Wheels within wheels, you know.”

“All right,” he said, getting up with a rueful sort of laugh, “I won’t
throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery just yet. We’ll let another
day go by and see what happens. But if nothing does happen within the
next twenty-four hours, I think it will be a case for the police.”




CHAPTER V

THE LEGS OF A SUIT OF PAJAMAS


Punch didn’t want to be sent to bed, so he was adroitly evading his
mother’s notice, flitting about the edges of the evening’s gaiety and
lingering in the shadows. It was a warm windless evening. It would be
stuffy in his little room on the top floor and he was feeling wide
awake and rather restless. But out-of-doors, in the verandas and on
the lawn, it was nice. The moon was dead full, hanging, an undisputed
dignitary, in the cloudless sky. Not so exciting as when it went
sailing through a scud of flying clouds, but he didn’t crave excitement
just now. He’d had enough.

They were dancing in the big west drawing-room--some of them were. Some
of them seemed to share--though it couldn’t be from the fear of being
sent to bed--his own preference for the shadows. In a sort of glade
down at the bottom of the lawn, so far away that the music must almost
have been inaudible, one pair were dancing, barefoot, Punch believed.
There’d been some talk of what fun it would be, and Judy had applauded
the idea, though she herself wasn’t dancing, of course, because of her
ankle.

She was permanently established in a long chair in the corner of the
veranda, holding a sort of court between dances, and always with one
man or another beside her when the music played. She adored dancing,
Punch knew, and he wondered a little that she didn’t permit her ankle
to get better.

Bruce Applebury danced indefatigably. He always came back with his
partner and sat beside Judy during the intermissions. But Punch had
heard Judy tell him it was his duty to make the rounds of at least all
the bridesmaids, so he didn’t sit out many dances with her.

Punch was beginning to feel a little like a ghost. The mixture of cold
moonlight with the music and the odor of a great thicket of lilac
bushes in bloom at the corner of the house, was distilling a sort of
melancholy in him, when the voice of the one he had privately ticketed
as the nice bridesmaid roused him from the trance into which he was
drifting.

“Oh, but I’ve promised this dance to Punch,” he heard her say to the
man who, with his hand on her arm, was trying to lead her down from the
veranda to the lawn.

He’d approached them unconsciously in his irregular orbit--Judy was the
center of it--but on hearing this, he stopped before her and made her
his best bow. The man, with a laugh, relinquished her arm, said he’d
come back for the next, and strolled away, lighting a cigarette.

Punch didn’t know the girl’s name; their acquaintance had begun in a
spontaneous exchange of smiles at the tennis court, and they’d had a
lot of fun together in the pool.

“I _can_ dance,” he said, a little doubtfully, when they were left
alone, “but I’m not sure that mother doesn’t think I’ve gone to bed.”

The girl laughed and laid her hand on his arm. “We’ll go for a little
walk instead then,” she decided.

She was a nice girl, and Punch didn’t think she’d make the opening
remark which some of the others, earlier in the day, had devastated him
with, “Won’t you miss Judy horribly when she’s married?”

His confidence was justified. She didn’t. She talked about sensible
things: swimming strokes, and how it felt the first time you tried
a high dive; the probable delights of owning a motorcycle, and so
on. Eventually they got around to talking about the pleasures of not
traveling in Europe and the advantages of being an American.

When they heard the music stop, he said, with real regret, “I suppose
if you’re promised for the next dance I’d better take you back.” After
a ripple of applause they heard the dance go on again, but now they
were strolling back toward the house.

“I envy Judy,” she said suddenly. “I wish I had a nice young brother of
my own.”

“If you did,” Punch blurted out, “you’d probably just go and get
married.”

She withdrew her hand from his arm, where it had rested quite
comfortably all the while. He needed both his hands just then, for his
eyes were threatening him with disaster. She put her arm across his
shoulders and for a moment held him tight. Then she let him go, and
walked on.

“It’s funny how black the shadows are in the moonlight,” she said. “You
can’t see a thing. Do you know yet where you’re going to college?”

She _was_ a nice girl.

They came up into the veranda just as the dance was coming to an
end--really this time. The man she had left was waiting there to claim
her, and Punch turned for a look at Judy. He had an idea that he might
sit out the next dance with her.

She happened, just then, to be alone. A moment earlier, Punch was sure,
a man had been standing before her, bending over. Now he was gone, and
Judy was holding something in her hand. A letter, or what looked like
it. Not just a scrap of a note, for when she tried to fold it small it
offered some resistance.

This movement seemed half frightened, although this didn’t exactly
describe the look that was in her face. She started to tuck the thing
down inside her dress, suddenly desisted and, with an exasperated
laugh, snatched it out again. She glanced around, helplessly at a
loss. Then her hand darted out to a narrow-necked Chinese vase which
stood on the table beside her, and she pushed her letter down inside.
It wouldn’t be very easy to get out again, Punch reflected, for the
hastily folded paper would spring apart.

The next moment Bruce Applebury came out through the open French
window from the drawing-room and sat down beside her.

“Just on the minute,” she remarked to him. “Like a man in a play.”

Punch stood rooted where he was. He wouldn’t have gone to her even if
Bruce Applebury hadn’t come out. The fog of trouble which the nice
bridesmaid had for the while dissipated stole again over his spirit.

He didn’t know who the man was who had given Judy the letter--except,
of course, that it wasn’t Bruce. He’d barely glimpsed him out of the
corner of his eye. There was something secret and hasty about the whole
episode that didn’t go with his idea of Judy. What he hated worst about
it was the look in her face that disputed with the fright in it.

He was sunk so deep in a brown study that his mother caught him without
difficulty and sent him to bed.

But it wasn’t so easy to send him to sleep. The music went on and
on, floating in through his open window, nagging his jangled nerves.
It was punctuated, too, by disconcerting little fragments of talk
coming up astonishingly clear now and then from the strollers on the
lawn. Nothing that meant anything; just broken phrases, exclamations,
giggles. It annoyed him that people could be so horribly silly.

He must have drifted off, though, at last, for he sat up suddenly in
bed, bolt awake from an unreasonably unpleasant dream. The party must
be over and everybody gone to bed, for the house was silent, except,
he noted with disgust, for the grumble of conversation that was going
on in the adjoining bedroom. Bill Grant’s it was, and he imagined he
identified the other voice, that was doing most of the talking, as
Bruce Applebury’s. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He was
afraid though that if they talked any louder he might hear.

He lay down again and turned and tossed. No hope of getting asleep
till they stopped. Finally, in desperation he got up, padded softly
out through the billiard room to a near-by bathroom, got himself a
drink and splashed his hot face with cold water. This refreshed him
somewhat, but he didn’t want to go back to his room. The big davenport
in the hall, one flight down, occurred to him as a quieter, and perhaps
cooler, place to sleep. He wouldn’t need any covers. It was too hot a
night. So with infinite precautions against noise he stole down there.
He’d meant to sleep there anyway if the necklace had not already been
stolen.

It wasn’t very dark down there in the second-floor hall. It had two
big windows at one end and an enormous one above the stair-landing at
the other. And the big moon still had everything her own way in the
cloudless sky.

In spite of his precautions against making any noise, he did make one.
In the process of disposing the pillows on the davenport, he dropped
one on the floor with a plop.

A moment or two later Judy’s door opened, and she asked, in a clear,
penetrating whisper, “Who’s that?”

“I dropped a pillow,” he said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You!” she said.

She came over to the davenport and stood looking down at him. She had
on the same orange-colored kimono that she’d worn when she went to her
grandmother’s room before dinner.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Still keeping watch?”

“It was stuffy up in my room,” he explained, “and I couldn’t sleep.”

She gave a little shiver, not with cold, and sat down beside where he
lay.

“I can’t sleep either,” she told him. “It’s beastly. Punch, I tell you
what let’s do. Let’s go out for a ride on bicycles. There’s another one
besides yours up in the old stable. You go ahead and get them, and I’ll
meet you here by the corner of the veranda.”

If he’d been feeling just right about Judy he’d have taken the thing as
a lark and gone, but he didn’t feel right. Her mention of the corner of
the veranda reminded him of something.

“I don’t want to go up-stairs and get dressed,” he objected. “There
were some people talking up there when I came down.”

She seemed concerned by that and asked him quickly, “Who?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “They were in Bill Grant’s room.”

She glanced sharply in the direction of the stairs as if she thought
she’d heard something, but decided she hadn’t.

“You don’t have to dress,” she pleaded. “Pajamas are all right, and
I’ll lend you a pair of my sneakers.”

“The whole house is locked up tight,” he objected. “We’d probably
set off the burglar alarm if we tried to open a door or a window
down-stairs.”

“We can go out my window, can’t we?”

That made the thing seem more fun, and he all but yielded; indeed he
had moved to get up from the davenport, when he noticed something.

“You’ve started to dress already, Judy,” he said.

“Shirt and bloomers,” she admitted. “Yes, I was going out anyway. I was
getting ready to when I heard you drop that pillow. I’ve left something
I want, down on the veranda.”

“That letter?” he asked.

There was a breathless sort of silence between them.

At last she said, “Don’t you care, Punch. You’ll understand some day,
maybe.”

He’d have gone with her then if he’d felt sure she wanted him, sure
that the proposal of a ride with him hadn’t been a mere pretext of hers
for an opportunity to recover her letter while he was up at the stable
getting out the bicycles. It was with a very sore spirit that he lay
down on the davenport again and let her go back to her own room and
close the door after her without a word.

He lay there straining his ears for a sound from her, but she must have
been moving about as quietly as a ghost for he heard nothing. Perhaps
he’d be able to hear her when she came in though, and she’d turn on the
light, wouldn’t she, to read her letter by?

But still there was nothing. The silence in the big house remained
unbroken.

He stood it as long as he could; then went to Judy’s door, opened it
and after a glance about the deserted room, left it open. He’d know,
now, when she came back, anyhow.

After that once more he fell asleep, only to be wakened as before by a
dream, or so he supposed at the moment, though he realized afterward
that the soft closing of a door might have done it. He sat up, and now
he heard footsteps shuffling along in felt slippers, and turning he saw
a man in pajamas crossing the hall.

There was more light than ever now. The moon shone slantwise through
the great window on the landing and threw a brightly lighted patch
upon the floor. As the legs of these pajamas crossed this patch he
saw them very plainly. They were gray, or lavender, or perhaps a
washed-out blue, and there was a triangular tear, such as might happen
from getting caught on a nail, in one of them. The rest of the man he
couldn’t see so well, and in a moment he was nothing but a shadowed
silhouette.

Punch almost spoke to him automatically, but checked himself with the
reflection that by doing so he’d give some slightly embarrassed guest
on his way to the bathroom a horrible start.

The next moment he sat up straighter and held his breath. The man
didn’t turn into the bathroom. He went straight on up-stairs. That was
strange. Why should a guest who slept on this floor go up-stairs in the
middle of the night? Or if his room were up there, why had he come down?

The boy was rather frightened now, and the realization that he was made
it a point of honor with him to investigate the mystery if he could.
So softly and swiftly he stole up-stairs too, alert for the sound of a
closing door or glimpse of a streak of light under one of them. There
wasn’t a sound, and the blackness up here in the billiard room was all
but complete. Was somebody lurking there, waiting? Some one who had
heard his following footsteps?

He stood still, overcoming a panicky impulse of flight. He at last
mustered his courage--really considerable, it seems to me--to the point
of moving over to the switch and turning on the light in the tin-shaded
chandelier over the table. The room was empty. The mystery remained
unsolved.

Well, he had done all he could anyhow, and he turned off the light
again and stole down-stairs.

He now went into Judy’s room and glanced around. No, she hadn’t come
back yet. She must have gone on that bicycle ride after all. It must be
horribly late. He carried her watch from the night-table to the window.
After three. He stole back to his uneasy bed on the davenport.

He wasn’t yet quite at the end of his night’s adventures. He sprang up
again almost before he’d had time to lie down. His grandmother’s door
was opening. Somebody with an electric torch was coming out.

“Who’s that?” he asked sharply.

The figure gave a violent start. It was Miss Digby in her old
plum-colored bathrobe.

“Punch!” she cried, “what are you doing here?”

“Trying to get a night’s sleep,” he said. “What’s happened? Is anything
wrong with grandmother?”

“No,” Miss Digby said. “I was waked up a few minutes ago by hearing
this door shut. I’ve been frightened pretty near out of my wits. I wish
you wouldn’t go poking around the house in the middle of the night.”

He didn’t tell her he hadn’t shut a door. The only thing on his mind
was Judy’s door standing open. Old Digs mustn’t go in there and find
that she was gone. So he told her he wouldn’t poke around any more,
and, glad to be rid of her so easily, went back to the davenport.




CHAPTER VI

REWARD OF MERIT


Punch told me he didn’t know when it happened; whether he dreamed it,
or whether it broke over him as he was falling asleep or just in the
moment of his waking up.

He lay awake for ever so long after promising Miss Digby he wouldn’t
go poking around any more, worrying because Judy didn’t come back;
wondering what could be in the letter she was willing to risk so much
to get; speculating over the mysterious errand of the man in the gray
pajamas. But all these thoughts got him nowhere. His mind, so he
described it, was just playing leap frog with itself. He saw the sky
turn gray, and then pink.

Finally, when it was broad day, he fell asleep. And the next thing he
knew, Miss Digby was shaking him by the shoulder, telling him it was
half past eight and he’d really better go up to his room and dress.

His first thought was of Judy’s door, and his first glance showed
him that it was shut. But this, he instantly perceived, didn’t mean
anything. The servants must have been up for at least an hour. The
chambermaid, seeing Judy’s room empty, would have assumed she’d gone
for an early ride, made up her room and closed the door after her.
However, it was good as far as it went. Judy might be in there, sound
asleep in bed. Probably was.

Miss Digby gave his shoulder another shake. “Punch, you’re still half
asleep,” she insisted. “Get up.”

Then he sat up, blinking at her, and realized all in an instant, or
thought he did, that he knew the whole thing. The puzzle had worked.

“Have you found them yet?” he asked.

“Found what?” she demanded impatiently.

He must still have looked to her like a sleepy little boy, for she
added, “Wake up!”

“I’m awake now, all right,” he told her. “Have you found the
pearls--the necklace--in grandmother’s room?”

“If you aren’t half asleep, you’re out of your head!” she told
him sharply. “How should I find them? They were stolen. Have you
forgotten? Last night before dinner.”

“Sure, they were stolen,” he agreed. “They’ve been brought back. A man
brought them back last night. That’s what you heard. Him shutting the
door just as he was going out.”

She went rather white at that and stood staring at him. It must have
been, of course, to that respectable spinster, a perfectly horrifying
idea that any man had invaded the room where she was sleeping, let
alone a thief.

“If you’re joking,” she went on, gathering herself together, “all I can
say is that it’s extremely bad taste.”

“I’m not joking,” he told her. “Listen. Don’t you remember coming out
last night and telling me you’d heard a door shut. I hadn’t shut any
door--but I’d seen the man.”

“You’d seen a _man_! Going into that room?”

“No, of course not. If I’d have seen him going into that room, I’d have
done something about it. I saw him going along the hall in pajamas. I
thought he was going to the bathroom, there at the foot of the stairs.

“Instead of doing that he went up the stairs, and I thought it was
funny, because why should a man on this floor go up-stairs in the
middle of the night? So I followed him up to see who he was and where
he went. I didn’t see him at all, after he’d turned the corner at the
landing. So I came down again. And then you came out and said you had
heard a door shut.

“I didn’t figure it out at the time, but it’s plain enough now. He’s
the man who stole the necklace. But he’d made up his mind that he
wasn’t going to get away with it, so he brought it back. You’ll find
it’s in there.”

She was shaken all right, but still a long way from being convinced.

“I think you’re talking perfectly crazy nonsense,” she declared.
“Punch, aren’t you making it up--about the man in pajamas?”

“Do you think I’d joke about a thing like that?” he demanded hotly.
“The necklace is there, I tell you. I’ll bet anything it is. Is
grandmother awake yet?”

“No, she’s still sleeping I think.”

“That must have been some hypodermic you gave her last night,” Punch
commented. “Come along then; let’s look.”

Still with a strong air of protest, she followed him to the old woman’s
sitting-room. Punch darted across to the safe.

“That’s locked,” Miss Digby commented. “Mr. Alexander Corbin locked it
last night.”

Punch tried the handle and found she was right.

“He’d have put it in there if he could,” he said reflectively. “But
it wouldn’t have been worth the risk of stopping to unlock it, with
you right here. So he’s left it somewhere around the room.--It’s like
I-Spy,” he commented, with a little laugh.

He stood still looking about. Presently his eye fell on the long
morocco covered box lying disregarded and unvalued on the big table in
the middle of the room.

“That’s where it is, of course,” he said. “Look and see.”

Where she stood it was almost under her hand. With trembling fingers
she pressed the spring and the lid flew open. There the necklace was,
gleaming, creamy and wonderful, under the shadow of the box lid.

Miss Digby gasped and stood for a moment clinging to the edge of the
table for support. Then, to Punch’s utter consternation, she turned
upon him.

“Punch,” she cried, “how could you! How _could_ you! Do you hate me as
much as that?”

“How could I what?” he asked, from the depths of a profound
bewilderment.

She dropped into his grandmother’s big chair and broke into a
passionate fit of weeping.

“I knew they’d think I’d taken it. I’m the one who could. Your
grandmother leaves the safe open half the time, and sometimes, when she
can’t remember the combination, I have to unlock it for her. And then
you take it--for a joke, I suppose--and bring it back, after I’ve been
in torture for hours and hours, and make me find it.”

“Nobody suspected you, Digs,” he told her. “Nobody could have. But I
didn’t take it, and I didn’t bring it back.”

He stood there for a few miserable minutes, helplessly at a loss. Then
he said, “Well, I guess I’d better go and tell mother they’re back.”
With that he left the room.

He didn’t, however, go straight to his mother with the news. He
sat down for a while first, feeling rather weak in the legs, on the
davenport.

Old Digs’ accusation disturbed him, but not profoundly. Uncle Alec
would probably think as Miss Digby did, that he’d taken the necklace
for a joke, and it would be pretty hard to convince him to the
contrary. Really, no one could be blamed for regarding his story of the
man in the pajamas as fishy.

But his mother and Judy couldn’t think that, or wouldn’t be likely
to, because they thought they knew who the thief was. Otherwise they
wouldn’t so strongly have opposed calling in the police.

That letter Judy had got last evening on the veranda probably had
contained a full confession of what she’d suspected. She’d had to hide
it before she had time to read it because she’d seen Bruce coming out
of the drawing-room, and he might have asked her about it. Why she
hadn’t hidden it in her dress as she’d started to do, he couldn’t make
out. Probably for the minute she’d just lost her head. But having
shoved it down into that Chinese vase, she’d have some trouble getting
it out again, and she’d have to be by herself in order to do it. And of
course she had to get it back unless she wanted to run the risk that
some one else would find it.

This did pretty well, although it wasn’t a wholly satisfactory
explanation. It didn’t cover all the ground. It didn’t explain why Judy
hadn’t climbed back into her window again within ten minutes after the
time she’d climbed out of it.

He was under an almost overmastering impulse to go into her room now,
see if she was there, and if she was, tell her about the recovery of
the necklace before he told even his mother. He decided he mustn’t do
it. Suppose she weren’t there? Then he’d have to tell his mother that
she was gone. He’d be asked whether he knew anything about her flight
and he couldn’t be sure that loyalty to Judy would permit him to tell
what he knew.

He’d better go to his mother first. Then perhaps he wouldn’t be asked
any questions about his sister. After all, it was good news he was
bringing. The necklace had been restored, and it wouldn’t be necessary
to tell anybody, beyond those who already knew, that it had ever
disappeared.

He knocked on his mother’s door and she told him, rather quickly, to
come in. She was sitting up in bed, her breakfast tray on her lap, the
morning mail beside her.

“You oughtn’t to be wandering all over the house at this time of day in
your pajamas,” she told him--good-naturedly enough, though. “Why don’t
you go up and get dressed?”

“I’ve been having quite a night of it,” he said. “But it’s all right
now. Mother, the necklace is back!”

Then he stood staring at her, speechless, utterly appalled, for her
face, lips and all, had turned gray.

“Back!” she said. “What do you mean?” And then like the crack of a
whip, “Where is it? Who’s got it?”

“D--Digs,” he managed to say. “It’s--it’s in grandmother’s room. In the
box where she kept it. On her table.”

“Digs found it, did she?” Victoria asked.

“Yes,” Punch said, “she found it, but--but I told her that was where it
would be.”

“Oh God!” Victoria cried out.

She sprang out of bed, pulled her dressing-gown around her and, without
waiting for slippers, darted toward the door. Then she came back, and
rummaging furiously among her letters in the morning’s mail found one
which she took with her.

She went straight across the hall with it to Judy’s room, and Punch
followed right at her heels. He was afraid she’d send him back, but she
didn’t seem to know he was there.

Judy was in her room in bed, lying back comfortably in the pillows, her
hands clasped behind her head and Punch noted that before she had time
to read her mother’s face, she was looking a little excited, perhaps,
but happy. Of course her look changed to astonishment when she saw
her mother and Punch, and she cried out sharply, “Mother, what’s the
matter?”

“The necklace has been brought back. Miss Digby found it. Punch, here,
was in on it somehow. And Judy, he’s coming to the wedding. I knew
she’d ask him. He’s coming this morning. I got the letter on the early
mail. Look!”

Judy took the letter and glanced through it rather indifferently. She
made a rueful face, but she said, “Oh, well, I don’t believe it matters
so awfully much anyway.”

“That’s all you know!” Victoria declared, furiously. “It will ruin
everything. Unless I can think of some way....”

She broke off and went to the window, where she stood with her back to
them.

“How did the necklace come back, Punch? Do you know?” Judy asked.

Half-heartedly, hardly believing it himself now, he told his story of
the man in pajamas whom he’d seen going up the stairs, of Miss Digby’s
telling him she’d heard a door shut, and how he himself had figured the
thing out.

It was then that Victoria turned upon him. He didn’t tell me what she
said, but Judy did later.

“Punch, you little fiend!” Victoria cried. “If you took it, why
couldn’t you keep it?”

Judy cried out at that in horrified protest, “Punch didn’t take the
necklace, unless he took it in his sleep. You _know_ that, mother.”

“Yes,” she said, “of course I do. I’m sorry.”

Then she said to Judy, “There is a way, just one way, and I’m going to
take it.”

With that she went back to her own room, and left the two children
staring at each other.

“Deep water, Punch,” Judy said. “But don’t you care. It’s all going to
come out in the wash before to-morrow afternoon.”




CHAPTER VII

IN THE SUMMER-HOUSE


It was from Victoria that I learned of the return of the necklace. She
telephoned me about nine o’clock Friday morning, and I was disposed at
first to be rather touched by her consideration for my own anxiety on
the subject. She cut short my congratulations, though, as soon as she
decently could, and made it plain that she had no time just then to
satisfy my thirst for details. She spoke suavely enough, but even over
the telephone I could guess that her troubles weren’t over yet.

“I wonder if you’ll do something for me?” she asked. “You’ve a spare
room down there at the cottage, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Surely. Whom do you want me to put up?”

I was rather hoping she’d say Punch, but she didn’t.

“You’ve heard of old Mr. Ethelbert Smith, haven’t you? I don’t believe
you’ve met him, because he’s lived in Paris for years and years and
years. He’s an old friend of Mrs. Corbin. I think he’s older than she
is. She invited him especially to come down for the wedding, and he
writes this morning to say he’ll come. I can make room for him, but I
thought with all the crowd and confusion here, he’d perhaps be more
comfortable with you.”

“I’ll be delighted,” I assured her. “When’s he coming?”

“I’m afraid it’s awfully short notice,” she said. “He’s coming down
to-day on the morning train. I’ll meet him myself and bring him around
to you about eleven o’clock. Of course I want both of you to come over
for dinner to-night--if you’ll keep him for me until then?”

“I can see that he gets over safely for dinner,” I told her. “I don’t
think I can come myself. A leg in a cast is a pretty awkward thing to
dispose of under a dining table.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ll argue that out with you later. It’s awfully
nice of you to take him off my hands. He seemed just a little more than
I could manage to-day.”

Glad as I was to be serviceable, I wasn’t very much thrilled by the
particular job Victoria had wished on me. She made it so plain that
she regarded him as an incumbrance--she’d as good as said I wasn’t to
permit him to escape to The Oaks until dinner time to-night--that I
didn’t look forward much to six or eight hours of the ancient man’s
undiluted society.

I passed a restless unpleasant sort of morning, and by eleven o’clock
I was feeling sorry for myself. Punch hadn’t turned up for his morning
call. I was mindful, too, of Judy’s promise to come and give me a look
at Bruce Applebury. Unless they came early, before old Mr. Ethelbert
Smith arrived, I shouldn’t have much chance for a real visit with them.

They hadn’t come, though, nor had I received any word of any sort from
The Oaks, when, at a little after eleven, Victoria delivered her guest
at my door. On hearing the car drive up I’d sent out Donovan, my nurse,
to help fetch the old gentleman inside, and I’m afraid I betrayed my
surprise with an unmannerly stare when there came in at her heels a
very tall old man, slender and straight as a lance, as he stood erect
after the rather ceremonious bow he had made when he ushered Victoria
into my doorway.

Anything more unlike the image of senile decay which she had prepared
me for, it would be hard to imagine. He was old, to be sure, very
old, perhaps, for his lean clean-shaven face was deeply lined and his
short white hair was, no doubt, thinner than it once had been. He
looked a little like the picture of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Not Mr.
Justice Holmes--his father. His dark eyes had a twinkle of ironic
amusement in them, which may have been due merely to the astonishment
I had momentarily exhibited at sight of him, or may have been due to
something else.

Victoria introduced us rather breathlessly and then, cutting across our
politely reciprocal murmurs, said, “I really can’t stop a minute. If
you knew what things were like at the house.... You’ll both excuse me,
won’t you? And we’ll all see you at dinner; it’s at eight, you know.”

With that she was gone, so hastily that she almost collided in the
entry with the chauffeur who was bringing in Mr. Smith’s bags.

“There’s a certain economy about Victoria’s method,” he remarked in
a tone of dry amusement. He added instantly, with the friendliest
concern, “Oh, don’t let me keep you on your crutches.” He waved me back
to my couch, and to make it easier for me to obey the gracious gesture,
he promptly seated himself in a near-by chair.

“I’m afraid she’s rather foisted me upon you,” he went on, “under the
pretext that she can’t make me comfortable in the other house. I don’t
know what she thinks I want. I’m an old campaigner, and not an exigent
person at all, so you’re not to allow me to weigh upon your conscience
or your spirits. Presently your man shall show me where my room is, and
then you’re to trust me to make myself comfortable.”

He left me with something to think about after these suggestions had
been carried out. Whatever reason Victoria might have had for not
wanting Mr. Ethelbert Smith at The Oaks, it was not the reason she had
given me. The man would have been a social asset at any house party. I
felt sure that he would have enjoyed the jolly confusion generated by a
crowd of high-spirited young people as well as anybody. And I believed
Victoria knew it perfectly well. They seemed, at least, to be pretty
well acquainted. His characterization of her high-handed ways as
“economy of method” showed that.

He’d seemed a little surprised at my asking him if he’d just returned
from Paris.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I retired from business several years ago and when
I did that I came home. I do a little work now and then--for Lloyds,
mostly--just to keep from getting rusty, and by way of having leisure
to enjoy. A man with no occupation, you know,” he remarked, “has no
leisure. He’s kept busy all the time looking for something to do.”

I laughed at that, tapped my stone leg and told him I agreed with him
heartily.

It may have been this expression of my own weariness of doing nothing
which led him, when he came down-stairs again a little later, coolly
clad in mohair, to make a suggestion which produced some unexpected
results.

“I was thinking of going out for a stroll,” he said, “but why don’t
you come with me? That wheel chair of yours looks seaworthy. I saw
a pleasant little summer-house up on the hill, beyond your ruins.
Couldn’t Donovan wheel you up there, with a little help perhaps from
me? You’d enjoy a change and a new view, and, I should think, a
certain amount of exercise.”

It was a perfectly practicable idea, as well as an attractive one, so
we carried it out at once. I wondered a little that I hadn’t thought of
it myself days ago. He carried my field-glasses along to amuse himself
with and I was munitioned with a book, so that he might feel at liberty
to stroll off and leave me if the humor took him. This, after a period
of pleasant chat about nothing in particular, is what he did.

The summer-house is nothing much but a conical roof supported by rustic
trellised poles, open at all sides to the breeze, and though these are
more or less overgrown with vines, it still commands a pretty wide
prospect all around the hill. I turned my back on the melancholy ruin
of my house and faced down the path by which we had come, the cottage
in the middle of my view with the road to The Oaks winding down the
valley.

I sat there contentedly enough for quite a while, ruminating and hardly
more than half awake. The mysteries connected with old Mrs. Corbin’s
necklace were still mysterious to me, to be sure, but since the thing
had been returned, my interest in it was largely academic. I hadn’t,
you are to remember, seen Punch that morning.

I was mildly curious about my guest. I wondered what the business
had been that had kept him living in Paris so many years. He hadn’t
volunteered to tell me, and of course I hadn’t asked. And what was the
sort of work that he did occasionally for Lloyds? Since they write
every conceivable kind of insurance, the name didn’t tell me much.

I was aroused suddenly by becoming aware that I was going to have
visitors. I can’t say how, because I can’t remember having heard their
footsteps or their voices. My back was to the entrance, so I wheeled my
chair around to see who it was.

Judy and her young man! She’d remembered her promise after all. They
were almost upon me. She was holding out her hand to lead him inside.

“Here we are,” she said to him.

One sees so quickly and so much, and it takes so long to tell! I had
time to take him in from head to foot and to reflect that I liked him
better, judging merely from his looks, than Punch or Alec Corbin,
or even Judy herself had led me to believe I should. I had time to
observe a deep sober preoccupation in both their faces; to see that he
drew breath to speak, and to guess that he was going to say nothing but
just her name.

And then suddenly I cried out, heartily and rather loudly, “Hello!” for
I had also had time to realize that I must make my presence known at
once.

They hadn’t come to see me. They couldn’t have expected to find me here
unless they’d been to the cottage first, and if they’d done that they’d
have been fairly in my field of vision all the way up.

They both started galvanically at my voice. Then the man scowled in my
direction. No kindlier word will do for it; it was a black scowl and
nothing else. I think Judy said something admonitory to him under her
breath.

I realized, somehow, even in that moment of profound misunderstanding,
that what I saw wasn’t the mere vexation of a pair of lovers who had
found already appropriated the retreat they’d intended for their
love-making.

Judy came in at once, a curiously complicated look in her
face--affection for me was a part of it--and gave me a brief kiss,
expressive more than anything else of apology for their bad manners
the moment before. She walked without a trace of a limp. Evidently
she’d allowed her ankle to get well.

“It’s perfectly great up here, isn’t it?” she said.

“It’s great now that you’ve come and brought Bruce Applebury to make
that call you promised,” I said, and held out a welcoming hand to him
on the words.

He didn’t come forward to take it, but remained as if rooted in the
entrance to the summer-house. If ever I saw consternation written plain
upon an open countenance, I saw it then.

Judy patted my shoulder encouragingly, as one might pat a horse that
was going to shy.

“All wrong!” she said. “All wrong! We didn’t come up here to see you.
We came because we had something to talk about and I said I knew a
good, safely deserted place where we could do it.--And this isn’t
Bruce, you know. Bruce has gone to town on an errand. This is his
cousin, Bill Grant.”

She must have felt me give the start she’d been expecting. “Shake
hands, you two,” she commanded curtly.

I felt she meant it, somehow, as a guarantee, and held out my hand
again, and this time he came forward and took it, but still without a
word. Then he sat down heavily on the circular seat that ran around the
place. His face was shining with sweat, and he got out his handkerchief
and mopped it.

“You’re out of condition, Bill,” Judy remarked. “This life of crime is
too much for you.”

She sat down herself in a big hickory chair, straightened out her legs
in front of her and looked thoughtfully at her feet. I take no blame
for the ensuing silence. I can’t think yet of anything I could have
said.

Judy finally broke it. “After all,” she said, looking up at Bill, “I
don’t know why not. Since he’s here, maybe it’s providential.”

She turned to me. “You like to hear long stories, don’t you? Stories of
people’s lives, their terrible pasts and all that? Do you want me to
tell you one?”

She had startled her companion, I could see, but it wasn’t, I thought,
as if he meant to try to dissuade her.

“Go ahead and tell it,” I said.

But before she had time to say another word, there were some more
footsteps; jaunty footsteps, if that’s a fair way to describe them.
Judy’s eyes widened as she listened. Bill Grant had sprung erect.

“It’s Mr. Ethelbert Smith,” I said swiftly. “He’s staying with me, you
know.”

“Oh, damn!” whispered Judy. Then with a swoop she flew to meet him.

“Why, Judy!” I heard him cry. “This is delightful!”

“Isn’t it?” she agreed. “But,” she went on, reaching around for Bill
Grant and hauling him out to be introduced, “this is not the blushing
bridegroom; he’s the next best man. Mr. Smith, Mr. Grant. Bruce’s
cousin, you know. Bruce had to go to town on an errand, so we’re”--she
waved a hand toward the grassy slope--“making hay.”

“I can’t blame either of you,” he said gallantly, with a look of frank
admiration from one to the other. “A much more respectable occupation
than mine has been. I’ve been up there in the woods”--he patted my
field-glasses--“spying upon the innocent domesticities of little
birds.”

There were no more silences after that. We all talked volubly and
nobody really said anything. There wasn’t a word about the necklace.

I wondered uneasily whether old Mr. Smith wasn’t noticing something
unnaturally vacuous about our talk. Certainly for an old family friend
he was showing very little curiosity. He wasn’t asking a question. Had
he seen anything queer through those damned field-glasses of mine?

I kicked that question out of my mind with the contempt it deserved.
Judy wasn’t like that, anyhow. The great wonder, what the story was
which she’d seemed to be on the point of telling me, I simply didn’t
dare let my mind dwell upon. That would have to wait.

It was mainly a relief, though my feelings were somewhat mixed, when
Judy said, with a queer flicker of a smile at me, “Well, we must be
going along. This is going to be a busy day,” and took her “next best
man” away with her.

They went, not down the path toward my cottage, but back by the way
they had come.




CHAPTER VIII

EXPERT CONSIDERATION


I was afraid after they’d gone that old Mr. Smith would begin asking
embarrassing questions, but his curiosity, if he had any, was under
perfect control.

He launched as a topic of conversation the modern young person, and at
just that moment I was grateful to him, although it is a subject which,
as far as I am concerned, has been thoroughly talked out. Ordinarily
I find myself desperately bored with the solemn and terrified
generalities one hears. I like the young people of to-day, but as for
the modern young person, considered as something essentially new, a
product of post-war conditions or a judgment upon our sins, I simply
don’t believe the little monster exists.

I didn’t, however, express myself in this destructive manner to Mr.
Smith. I coddled the topic along. Anything was welcome that would keep
us away from the tangled skein of fact that Judy seemed involved in.

“Manners change, I admit,” I said, “but manners are by definition
conventional conduct, conduct which has no significance one way or
the other. Think of this wedding. Judy’s going to be married in the
garden, and her bridesmaids, from what I hear of the costumes, are
going to look more or less like a chorus in a light opera. It will be
an amazingly pretty picture, no doubt. But Victoria in her day would
as soon have thought of being married in a bathing suit. Victoria
would have been horrified at the idea of sleeping the night before
her wedding under the same roof with the man she was going to marry.
Victoria was supposed to be shy, so she acted as if she were. But that
doesn’t mean that she was any finer or cleaner-minded than Judy is. No,
the younger generation....”

My argument was interrupted.

“Here comes a sample of it now,” said Mr. Smith, who was gazing down
the path. “Heavens, that’s not Punch, is it?”

It was though, and he was a good sight; hatless as always, and clad in
khaki shirt and trousers which went well with his brown skin. He was
carrying his little target rifle.

There was no doubt that he was coming to make me a visit, for he waved
gaily toward the summer-house as he came along. He and I both got a
surprise, though, out of his meeting with Mr. Smith; Punch because
he hadn’t had the least idea he’d find him with me, and I over the
discovery that they were old friends. They greeted each other with
enthusiasm.

“I hadn’t realized you were so well acquainted,” said I.

“Oh, yes,” Punch told me; “we’re very old friends. Mr. Smith was the
nicest man in Paris that winter we lived there. He used to take me
around and show me things.

“My, but I’m glad you’re here,” he went on, turning back to the old
gentleman. “It comes out just right. But why aren’t you over at our
house?”

“Your mother asked me to take him in,” I explained. “She thought you’d
be too wild for him over there; too much row, late hours and so on.”

“Ho!” said Punch derisively to his very old friend, “there couldn’t be
too much row for you, could there?”

I thought I saw a troubled look coming into the boy’s eyes, so I
changed the subject.

“You out shooting rabbits?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t shot anything yet.”

“After bigger game perhaps,” Mr. Smith suggested. “Lions, or
hippopotamuses.”

“No,” said Punch, “I’m not hunting _anything_, really.”

“You aren’t _being_ hunted, are you?” Mr. Smith wanted to know.

I thought the boy flushed a little.

“No, I guess not,” he said.

“I suppose,” the old man suggested, “if they’re keeping such late hours
over at The Oaks, the mornings must be pretty slow.”

“Yes,” Punch admitted, “they are, rather. Oh, everybody’s up but
nobody’s doing anything. Nobody but Bruce Applebury. He went off to
town on the morning train, with Judy.”

I don’t know what happened to my face at that, but I can answer for Mr.
Smith’s. There wasn’t a flicker of an eyelid to betray anything.

Punch was looking at him just as I was, and he went on, “He’s the man
who’s going to marry Judy, you know. He was afraid he wouldn’t get
the sort of wedding ring she liked, so he took her in to-day to pick
it out.” He sighed and added, “I’ll be glad when this business is all
over.”

“How’s your grandmother?” Mr. Smith asked.

“Oh, she’s better this morning, now that she knows the necklace has
come back,” the boy said. “Of course it was an awful shock to her last
night when she found it had been stolen.”

I’d been holding my breath waiting for this to happen, from the moment
I had seen how friendly was the relation between the old gentleman and
the boy, but I hadn’t expected it to come out with a plop like that.
I felt rather embarrassed over my own reticence, but Mr. Smith didn’t
even indirectly reproach me with it.

“I didn’t know the necklace had been stolen,” he said. “I’ve only just
got here, you see. Tell me about it.”

“There’s Donovan,” I pointed out. “He’s coming up to tell us lunch
is ready, I expect. You’ll stay, won’t you, Punch? And then you can
tell Mr. Smith the whole story of how the necklace was stolen.--And
perhaps,” I added, “you’ll tell me, too, the details of how it came
back.”

For I didn’t see any point, now that the cat had got out, in trying to
make a mystery of the empty bag.

I was relieved, though, that Punch’s story, which he told with
admirable lucidity at lunch time, was considerably abridged where it
touched Judy. Of course at that time I knew nothing of the letter that
had been pushed through the narrow neck of the Chinese vase, nor of her
nocturnal excursion for its recovery. Punch’s account of his adventures
that night left this episode out.

He told us how, when he couldn’t sleep in his room on the top floor,
he’d come down to the davenport in the hall below; how he’d seen a man
in pajamas going up-stairs; how the mystery had completely baffled him
at the time; how Miss Digby had told him of the fright she’d had, and
how, between sleep and waking he’d figured out what had happened.

“Good work, Punch,” Mr. Smith said, when the tale was told. “I’m proud
of you.” His tone, though, wasn’t as enthusiastic as his words. He’d
spoken with only half his mind, as if out of some deep preoccupation.

“Well, that’s more than anybody else is,” the boy answered. “You see
they all think--mother and Miss Digby and Uncle Alec--that I took the
necklace myself, for a joke or something, and then brought it back in
the middle of the night. It’s what anybody would think if they didn’t
believe the story of the man in the pajamas. And it _is_ sort of a
funny story. Only, you see, I _saw_ him.”

“Yes,” Mr. Smith said thoughtfully, “it is a funny story, sure enough.”

The boy looked from one of us to the other, possibly to satisfy himself
that we ourselves believed it. He must have done so, for presently he
went on.

“It gets even funnier than that. Because, you see, as long as they
thought I’d done it, I wanted to know whose pajamas I’d seen, and
who it probably was who wore them. So after they’d all gone down to
breakfast, I went around and saw all the pajamas there were--all that
had been slept in, I mean--and I couldn’t find the pair I’d seen last
night. They weren’t on the top floor, so I went down to the second
floor, and they weren’t there either.”

“Are you sure you saw them all?” Mr. Smith asked.

“I counted,” said Punch. “I found a pair for everybody.”

“Servants too?” Mr. Smith asked.

“No,” said Punch. “But you see there isn’t any third floor to the
servants’ wing. The door to it opens into the second-floor hall where
the davenport is. If it had been one of the servants he wouldn’t have
gone up-stairs.”

“How well did you see the pajamas when the man was wearing them?” I
asked.

“Pretty well,” Punch said. “I saw the legs of them awfully well,
because they walked right through the moonlight and it was about as
bright as day. They were plain pajamas, gray, or some color like that,
and one of the legs was torn, a little square tear as if it had been
caught on a nail. Well, the only person in the house whose pajamas are
plain gray is Uncle Alec, and they weren’t torn. Besides he’s about
twice as big as the man I saw. Everybody else’s pajamas are fancy;
because of the wedding, I suppose. Anyhow, it’s a puzzle.”

“Well, the pearls are brought back, that’s one thing,” Mr. Smith
observed. “To your grandmother’s room, you say? Where are they now?”

Punch’s eye gleamed with a sudden pleasure. “That’s supposed to be a
great secret,” he said.

“Don’t tell any secrets,” Mr. Smith warned him quickly.

“Well, it isn’t a secret from you--from either of you,” Punch
explained. “And Donovan isn’t around, is he, nor any one else who’d
hear?”

“No,” I said, “you won’t be overheard. But how do you know we’re not to
be kept out of the secret?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “and then you’ll see. It’s a secret from
mother, all right, and Judy and Uncle Alec, but not from you.

“It was when I was going around on the second floor, looking at the
pajamas, that grandmother heard me and called me into her room. She
said I’d been right about the safe not being a safe place for the
necklace, so she was going to give it to me to hide. Only I was to
promise not to tell any one in the house that she’d done it, nor where
the necklace was, of course. But you see, you aren’t in the house, so
the secret doesn’t include you.”

I won’t pretend to have been satisfied that this bit of casuistry was
strong enough to bear, but my curiosity was much wider awake, just
then, than my conscience. I made no protest, and neither did Mr. Smith.
The boy went on:

“Mother came in just after Gran had given it to me and asked her where
it was, and Gran told her it was in the safe. She’d had me put the box
back in the safe and lock the safe up, but of course the box was empty.
Mother asked her when she was going to give the necklace to Judy, and
Gran said she would when she got ready. She always gets kind of cross
when you ask her a lot of questions. So mother saw it was no good
asking more and went away. And there I had it all the time.”

“Where did you hide it?” Mr. Smith asked.

Punch was thoroughly enjoying himself now, there could be no doubt of
that. The unjust accusations of his mother and Uncle Alec and old Digs
he could afford to ignore in the face of this magnificent compensation.

“Why, I thought of lots of places,” he said, “that would probably have
been all right, but I didn’t like them somehow, and then I thought
about _The Purloined Letter_--you know, that story of Poe’s. How the
safest hiding-place for anything is the last place where any one
would think of looking for it. So I just wrapped the necklace up in a
handkerchief and stuck it in my pocket.”

“Good lord!” I cried. “Is that where it is now?”

“Surely it is,” old Mr. Smith remarked calmly. “Hence the rifle.”

Punch flushed a little. “Of course it’s only a twenty-two,” he said,
“but it’s got a long cartridge in it.”

At first blush the idea of entrusting a famous jewel like the Corbin
necklace to the trousers pocket of a thirteen-year-old boy armed with
a little target rifle seemed wild enough, and when one added that
an inexplicable attempt had just been made to steal it, an attempt
that might be repeated at any hour, day or night, it became perfectly
frantic. I didn’t care much about the necklace, but I cared immensely
about the boy.

He was looking eagerly into my face, and must have read the
consternation that was printed plain upon it. “Can you think of a safer
place?” he asked. “Of course I suppose I could give it to you to keep
for me.”

“Heaven forbid!” I cried. “But there must be some other....”

I let the sentence fade out unfinished, and lapsed into a thoughtful
silence. I couldn’t think of anything better, and that was the truth.

“It’s years since I’ve seen that string of pearls,” Mr. Smith said
presently. “Let’s have a look at them, Punch.”

The boy plunged a hand deep into his pocket and pulled out a wadded and
rather grimy handkerchief which he spread open on the table. There the
thing was, all right. I stared at it fascinated.

It was beautiful, of course, that perfectly graded series of shining
globes, but I was moved by the sight of it to reflect how ridiculously
artificial our values are. That thing would buy leisure for a man’s
lifetime. Comparatively few men from the cradle to the grave are
able by their labors to earn as much as would be needed to buy it.
Numberless men alive in the world to-day would commit any crime up to
murder to possess it. It seemed absurd when one thought of it like that.

Possibly to carry out the illusion the thing wanted a better
background. Perhaps it suffered from the indignity of contact with a
small boy’s pocket handkerchief.

Old Mr. Smith took the thing in his fingers--unusually intelligent-looking
old fingers they were, as if habituated to handling pearls. Then I
glanced up at his face, and was struck by a conviction which for the
moment put the necklace clean out of my mind.

He had stuck a monocle into one eye. The gleam may have come merely
from the lens, but from wherever it came, there was so piercing a
brilliancy in his gaze that I almost shouted, “Old Eagle-Eye!” aloud.

I didn’t, of course. He went on studying the necklace, and Punch sat
gazing from his face to mine. Of course--of course! Why hadn’t I
identified him at once? He was the man Judy was to prevent, at all
costs, from getting a chance at something--the necklace, beyond a
doubt. That was why Victoria hadn’t wanted to keep him in the house.

Well, the best laid plans go wrong sometimes. Victoria had overdone it.
There sat old Eagle-Eye with the necklace in his hands.

What was he going to do with it? I’ll admit that in my confounded state
of mind I’d hardly have been surprised at anything. I didn’t really
expect him to perpetrate a robbery with violence then and there, but
I was vividly conscious, for a fleeting instant, that Punch’s little
rifle was leaning up in the corner of the room, far out of reach. It
only shows what an atmosphere of persistent mystery will do to the
ordinarily well-behaved mind.

Mr. Smith, however, remained calm, and when he had done examining
the necklace, folded it up again in Punch’s handkerchief, rather
negligently I thought, and handed it over to the boy.

“Put it back in your pocket, Punch,” he said. “I can’t think of a safer
place for it.--But now that you’ve gratified our curiosity,” he went
on, “I think you’d better stretch the promise you gave your grandmother
to include everybody, out of the house as well as in it. Who are in the
house, anyway? Do you know them all?”

“Oh, hardly any of them, if you mean do I _really_ know, not just
who they’re supposed to be. I don’t think mother does, even; not the
Applebury crowd.”

“And the Appleburys,” commented Mr. Smith, “don’t know Judy’s crowd any
better. It’s a perfect situation, in a way.”

We weren’t very talkative during the rest of the lunch. The thoughts of
old Eagle-Eye seemed to be running mostly on the man in pajamas.

“You said he wasn’t near as big as your Uncle Alec. Was he noticeably
small; smaller, say, than any of the men in the party?”

“No,” Punch said, “I don’t think he was. He just looked about ordinary.
Of course, I didn’t see him very well, except his legs, and I didn’t
look at him very hard. I just thought he was somebody going to the
bathroom, until he started up-stairs. I think he looked sort of stout
and clumsy, as if he filled his pajamas rather full.”

“Are you sure it _was_ a man. I know you didn’t think of it at the
time, but mayn’t it have been a woman? I believe they wear pajamas
sometimes. And in any sort of men’s clothes they’re likely to look
heavy.”

I could see that the idea attracted Punch. It seemed to offer a
loophole of escape from his mystery. But he was too honest a witness to
avail himself of it.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think it was. I don’t think a woman would have
walked along like that.”

“You’re probably right,” the old man agreed. “Most women would look
like women even if they had on a man’s pajamas. We’ll stick to the men
for the present. Stout and stocky, medium height; does that describe
anybody in the party?”

Punch laughed. “The only one it describes is Bruce Applebury himself,”
he said.

Mr. Smith didn’t laugh. “What are _his_ pajamas like?” he asked.

“Sort of tan color,” said Punch, “with red stripes.”

I spoke up in the interests of common sense. “Surely you couldn’t
suspect....”

“I’d suspect anybody,” the old man asserted, “when we’re concerned
with a thing like that necklace. Oh, not suspect if you dislike the
word--but consider as possibly involved. I admit my point of view is
rather specialized.”

“He played tennis and swam practically from the time he came to the
house until he dressed for dinner,” I pointed out, “and the loss of the
necklace was discovered before he’d finished dressing.”

“Probably, then, he didn’t take it,” Mr. Smith conceded. “But he may
have brought it back, and that’s just as important a part of the
mystery.”

Without waiting to allow time for that to sink in, he turned to Punch.
“When is he--when are he and Judy expected back from town?” he asked.

“There’s a train about three. I think they’ll surely come on that,
because they’re going to rehearse the wedding this afternoon. You’ll
come over for that, won’t you?”

Eagle-Eye took this invitation with a twinkle. “Old men are supposed
to take naps after lunch,” he said. “Still, I may turn up. If I do,
suppose, since we’re already in mystery up to the neck, that you greet
me as if we were meeting for the first time since Paris. Can we get
away with it? Did anybody know you were coming here to lunch?”

“No,” said Punch. “I just sort of disappeared. I suppose I’d better
be going back now, though, or they may begin wondering where I am. I
_could_ eat another lunch, of course.”

We both laughed over that as we bade him farewell. But we turned
pretty serious as we watched him walk away with his little rifle.

“Do you think he’s safe going around with a hundred-thousand-dollar
necklace in his pocket?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Mr. Smith answered reflectively. “For one thing, he
hasn’t got it in his pocket.”

I must have gaped at him like a goggle-eyed fish. My mind once more had
gone to pieces. Had the old gentleman done a sleight of hand trick when
he returned that handkerchief?

“Oh, he’s got just what he brought over here with him,” he added.
“Undoubtedly the same thing his grandmother gave him this morning to
hide for her. It’s not the necklace. It’s a very fair imitation of it,
however.”

“You’re perfectly sure of that, I suppose?” I asked weakly.

He nodded.

“You’d better go back to your couch where you’ll be comfortable,” he
suggested. “We’ve got some thinking to do.”

I agreed, and rang for Donovan. When he’d made me comfortable and gone
away, Mr. Smith pulled up an easy chair for himself and lighted a cigar.

“I know that necklace intimately,” he began. “I sold it to Punch’s
grandfather in Paris, ’way back in the days of the Second Empire. Lord,
what a while ago! A man shouldn’t be allowed to live as long as that.
Eighteen hundred seventy it must have been, or thereabouts.

“I’m a jeweler by profession, and I was managing director over there
for Paulding and Revere. I’ve seen the necklace a number of times
since. Mrs. Corbin always gave me a look at it whenever she came to
Paris. So I can say with certainty that the thing Punch has in his
pocket is not merely a necklace of imitation pearls; it’s an imitation,
pearl for pearl, of that necklace. In fact, we can go a little further
than that, if you don’t mind my prosing a bit.”

“I don’t,” I assured him.

“Both the French and the Japanese make imitation pearls,” he went on.
“Serious imitations, I mean. Merely for purposes of wear, the French
pearls are better. Their luster’s more like the real thing. On a
pretty woman’s neck in a ballroom they wouldn’t be detected as not
the real thing. But the moment you pick them up, they give themselves
away. They’re much too light and much too translucent. Japanese pearls,
on the other hand, are the right weight, or very near it, and they
don’t betray themselves when you hold them against the light. But they
haven’t the luster, not even the best of them.

“Well, these are Japanese pearls. Whoever had the string made of them,
it’s fair to assume, wanted them for some other purpose than wearing to
parties. The French pearls would have been better for that, and cheaper
too. But they wouldn’t serve if they had to deceive some one who had
opportunities to handle them.”

“In other words they were made to deceive old Mrs. Corbin,” I broke in.
“Her eyesight has been failing for years.”

“That’s very likely a good guess,” he said mildly. “But let’s not begin
guessing just yet.

“She may have ordered the imitation made herself. She’s as likely to
have wanted to deceive Victoria, let us say, as Victoria is to have
wanted to deceive her. And with her poor vision she may have deceived
herself. The real string may have been knocking about, unregarded for
months, in some drawer of her dressing-table, while the imitation was
lying in the safe.

“All we know is that there are two strings, and that a person who
couldn’t see very well, either because his eyes were bad, or because
he was working in the dark, might easily mistake one for the other. We
know that the imitation string is now in Punch’s pocket. But where the
real string is we don’t know.”

“It’s reasonably probable, isn’t it,” I asked, “that the necklace
in Punch’s pocket is the same one that his grandmother showed him
Wednesday afternoon, when she told him she meant to give it to Judy for
a wedding present? It was taken from the safe, it was brought back, and
it was handed by his grandmother straight to Punch.”

“That’s as good a possibility as any,” said the old man. “The thief
takes it in a hurry and more or less in the dark, discovers at his
first good look at it that it’s an imitation, and brings it back. But
there are other hypotheses just as good.

“He may have seen a chance to take the real one at a time when he
hadn’t the imitation at hand to replace it with, and then brought the
imitation back in the hope that the loss hadn’t yet been discovered.
It wasn’t made public, I understand. Or some one may have borrowed the
real one and returned the imitation by mistake. Or one person may have
stolen the real one, and some one else, who later discovered the theft
and wished to shield the thief, may have brought back the imitation,
thinking he was making restitution. You see, it’s endless. The most
serious mistake we can make will be to begin thinking we know too much.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “One could easily do a cruel injustice to an
innocent person by jumping at conclusions.”

“That’s not just what I mean,” he said gently. “Perhaps I should have
said dangerous instead of serious. I’m more concerned over what may
happen in the next twenty-four hours than I am over what may have
happened--oh, any time within the last five years.”

He gave me half a moment of silence to digest that in.

“I’ll run the risk of speaking with the utmost plainness,” he then
went on. “I think I can guess how this thing looks to you. You believe
Victoria had that imitation string made for the purpose of imposing
upon her mother-in-law and getting possession of the real one. You
think she took alarm over Mrs. Corbin’s decision to give it to Judy,
because she thought that such a gift would lead to the discovery of the
substitution and that she’d be charged with it. You think that’s why
she didn’t want me stopping in the house.

“That’s all plausible enough. It may all be true. It would account,
after a fashion, for the disappearance of the imitation necklace from
the safe. She might have taken it herself; she might have persuaded
Judy to take it.

“But into that picture you can not fit the return of the necklace. You
can’t fit the man in pajamas, whom Punch saw. I have no intelligible
picture, yet, into which that man will fit. But the return, I tell
you frankly, seems to me to be sinister. It suggests strongly the
presence somewhere, as an active possibility, of the real necklace--not
stolen yet, but waiting to be. And accompanying that theft we may have
anything, up to murder. That’s why I say it’s dangerous to feel too
sure.”

With great deliberation, he extinguished his cigar in the ash tray and
rose to his full height.

“Invited or not,” he said, “I’m going to that house this afternoon. I
want to see the people in it. There aren’t a great many first-class
jewel thieves in the world, and I know the faces of a pretty fair
proportion of them. Of course people who aren’t jewel thieves sometimes
attempt to steal jewels--a covetous girl, a boy desperately in debt,
might make a frantic clutch, with no forethought, no preparation, and
of course, no possibility of ultimate success.

“If that’s the case here, I’m as helpless as any of you, for I can’t
read thoughts or intentions from people’s faces.

“But somehow to me the thing hasn’t quite that look. So I’m going
over to see whether I know any of Victoria’s guests better than
she does.--How about you? Will you come along? Can you manage in a
comfortable motor, if you’ve lots of room?”

I could manage it, all right, and my first impulse was to say I’d go.
Then I thought of something and changed my mind.

“I think I’ll stay at home this afternoon,” I told him, “and rest up
for that dinner.”




CHAPTER IX

MYSTIFICATION OF EAGLE-EYE


It was the thought of Judy that made me change my mind about going to
The Oaks with old Mr. Smith. I thought that perhaps if I were alone at
the cottage all the afternoon, and if the fact that I was here alone
were advertised by the presence of my ancient guest at The Oaks, she
might come back and tell me the story which he had prevented my hearing
at the summer-house.

My concern for the child was fast deepening into an acute distress. I
was spared, to be sure, the misery of doubting her essential rectitude.
I’d known her from the time she was a baby, and the long intervals
when I’d seen nothing of her had neither interrupted the growth of our
friendship, nor changed the quality of it.

She’d never been expansively confidential; reticence was, indeed,
one of her outstanding qualities. Victoria complained of her as
a close-mouthed little thing who kept everything to herself. But
candor--perhaps I shouldn’t put it that way, for I believe the two
things naturally go together--candor was not a virtue with her, but
simply an irresistible compulsion. She couldn’t even acquiesce at all
graciously in a pretense. I consider myself a decently straightforward
person, but I’ve been self-convicted a dozen times by a straight look
from Judy’s eyes of cowardly flinchings from the plain truth. I don’t
think she regards them as cowardly. She isn’t a bit of a prig. She
simply doesn’t understand how it can be done.

The pungent quality of cynicism which sometimes flavors her speech has
always one source--sham. She is cynical of shams.

I recalled a remark she had made to me only a day or two before, to
the effect that the horridest thing in the world was whitewash. Then,
with a start, I remembered the prediction she’d made in the next breath
that she was going to be coated with it this week. How much had she
known about the necklace then? Anything more than was involved in the
newspaper announcement that her grandmother was going to give it to
her as a wedding present?

In the light of Mr. Smith’s revelations this afternoon, I thought it
likely that she had known more; known that the necklace then reposing
in the morocco covered box in her grandmother’s safe was an imitation,
and that the fact somehow involved her mother’s credit. Didn’t an
invincible determination on Judy’s part to save her mother’s credit
account for everything the girl was doing--including, even, her
agreement to marry a man whom she didn’t love?

It was all very well for old Mr. Smith, whose emotions were running
cool and thin, to warn me against jumping at conclusions. But I had to
jump. I had nowhere else to go. So I nailed my conviction like a flag
to this mast.

It wasn’t necessary to try to work out all the details. Victoria had
done something--probably, in some desperate money crisis, stolen the
necklace; she’d always believed it was going to be hers some day--and
Judy had agreed to see her through.

How had that involved a marriage with Bruce Applebury? Possibly
Victoria had sold the necklace to him. Or possibly she’d done
something besides steal the necklace. (I found it comparatively easy,
that afternoon, to impute anything to Victoria.) At all events the
necklace, the real one, had to be recovered, somehow.

Was this the errand Judy and Bruce had started upon, this morning
under the innocent pretense of buying the wedding ring? Had she really
started with him and been compelled, by some unforeseen occurrence, to
turn back? Or had she only pretended to go with him in order to be free
for some other meeting, under the protection of his cousin?

What sort of rendezvous had my unexpected visit to the summer-house
prevented? Had old Mr. Smith, through my field-glasses, caught a
glimpse of the other party to it?

I had an exciting feeling, about then, that I was within one idea of
the solution. But this idea, widely as I cast my net for it, refused to
be caught. And presently my little pattern, fragmentary as it was, fell
to pieces again.

How was I going to account for the theft of the imitation necklace
and for the return of it? Well, I didn’t care about that. That didn’t
necessarily concern Judy at all.

But how about the thing that had happened to her on the veranda
yesterday afternoon when the guests were arriving? The thing that had
set her world rocking like a boat, that had led her to cry out to
Punch, “Are you on my side, whatever happens--whatever I do?” No, I
couldn’t solve that. I wanted her to come and tell me about it. She
didn’t come, though, and I put in the longest, dreariest afternoon I
can remember, waiting for her.

When Mr. Ethelbert Smith returned about six o’clock I was in so
detestably unamiable a state of mind that a resolute summoning of all
the manners I had ever learned hardly availed to produce a decent
show of politeness. I didn’t want, I told myself, any more of his
cold-hearted observations. However, common civility required me to
ask for them, and before he had gone very far I was listening with
unfeigned interest.

He began with an apology. He had permitted himself this morning to be
saddled upon me as a guest, and now, after I’d hospitably made him
welcome, and most comfortable, he added, he was about to climb out of
the saddle again. In short, he was about to pack his bags and go to The
Oaks to stay.

It appeared that old Mrs. Corbin, who’d been, of course, the first
person he’d asked for on arriving at the house, had seen him at once
and made him welcome in the friendliest manner. Furthermore she’d been
furiously annoyed to learn that he was not stopping under her roof, and
had insisted that he change his plans at once in order to do so.

“She’s altered greatly--by illness, of course,” he remarked, “but
she’s no less imperious than she was in her best days. She settled the
matter of my entertainment then and there, and summoned Victoria as
tyrannically as she would have sent for her chambermaid. Victoria came,
too.”

“Was she startled at finding you there?” I asked.

“If she was, she didn’t show it. She may have been warned, of course;
probably was. A question or two of the servant who brought the message
would have let her know what she had to expect. No, she took my being
there as the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t show more than
a flicker or two of resentment over the manner in which the orders were
given. She must, of course, be in a state of suppressed rebellion all
the time, for I fancy that sort of thing is an every-day occurrence.
I’m sorry for Victoria. I wouldn’t blame her much for anything she
might resort to, short of poison, as an escape.”

“Did you find out anything about the necklace?” I asked. “From the
old lady herself, I mean? Whether she knows of the existence of the
imitation one?”

“I was disappointed there,” Mr. Smith said. “I thought that when
Victoria had gone, Mrs. Corbin would unburden her mind. She has
something weighing upon it, I should say. But the emotion she’d wasted
over the matter of where I was to sleep had completely exhausted her.
She had to ring for her nurse, and tell me we’d have our visit later.
She wasn’t visible again all the afternoon. So I was told, at least,
and of course I couldn’t question it.”

Then, “Do you know anything about that nurse?” he asked.

“She’s been with Mrs. Corbin two or three years,” I told him. “Punch
regards her humorously, I think, but considers her above suspicion.
Why? Did you notice anything queer about her?”

“When I left Mrs. Corbin’s room,” he said, “she was parting from
Victoria in the hall. Evidently they’d been talking somewhere. It
struck me that the woman was frightfully upset--frightened or shocked,
I couldn’t tell which. She might have been found out in something,
or she might have been given some order she didn’t want to carry
out.--They aren’t drugging that old lady, are they?”

“She drugs herself, I understand--morphine. Naturally enough, after
years of pain.”

He looked like a very old man when I told him that, and he sat musing
over it for a long time. Finally he roused himself.

“Well, I didn’t find what I went for,” he said. “I made a point of
strolling about the house. I managed to see several of the servants;
not all of them, of course. But in a talk I had with Punch, I asked
him whether any new house servants had been taken on during the last
two weeks, and he said there had not. Somehow I don’t believe it’s the
servants we have to reckon with anyhow.

“I saw all the guests in the house eventually. There was quite a wait
for the principal performers. The others were all gathered for the
rehearsal of the ceremony, impatient as school children for it to be
over with, too, so that they could run away and play. But Judy and the
bridegroom, by failing for a long time to put in an appearance, kept
them waiting.”

“Was Bill Grant there?” I asked.

“He was. And his manner toward me excited my admiration. His weakness
is evidently that he mustn’t be surprised. Do you remember him this
morning, completely disconcerted, unable to contribute more than a
disjointed word here and there to the talk, floundering in the presence
of the unexpected? But evidently he’d foreseen the probability of an
encounter with me this afternoon, and he sustained it with complete
_sang froid_. Everybody else was discussing Judy’s trip to town
with her bridegroom. Nobody questioned but that was where she was
spending the day. He knew that I knew that she hadn’t gone to town,
that she’d spent the day, or a good part of it, surreptitiously with
him. Yet he confronted me without batting an eye, without attempting
a private explanation, or even a private signal entreating me not to
give them away. He was, I felt, in the circumstances almost formidably
self-possessed.

“His self-possession didn’t last him through the afternoon, however.
Fate had another surprise in store for him.”

“What was the surprise?” I asked.

“That’s the point of my story,” he said. “But let me tell it in order.
The fact that it doesn’t make sense makes it more important to approach
it methodically.

“Before Judy arrived with her bridegroom, I had seen every one of the
guests in that house, including Mr. Alexander Corbin and excepting only
the bridegroom himself. There was no one among them whom I recognized
as a professional jewel thief. Mr. Bruce Applebury then arrived with
Judy and I didn’t recognize him either. I had drawn blank as far as my
particular errand to the house was concerned. But I was diverted from
thoughts of my failure by something I saw happening under my eyes.

“I saw enacted a scene of perfectly tragic intensity, and I haven’t the
remotest idea now what it meant. I can tell it all in a very few words,
because the scene itself had no accompanying words at all.

“Judy, as I say, arrived in the car with Mr. Bruce Applebury. They
were surrounded at once by a group of young people who had been waiting
for them on the lawn, clamoring for the rehearsal to begin. I looked at
Mr. Applebury, realized that I didn’t know him and realized, further,
that I didn’t like him. He is self-important and oppressively correct.
He looked not sulky, exactly--mulish, that’s better. And victorious.
Like a bad-tempered parent who has just beaten one of his children and
has succeeded in persuading himself of his own righteousness.

“As for Judy, she was like an automaton; an amazingly life-like,
well-made automaton, capable of going where she should, answering
questions, even of responding in an appropriate manner to jokes.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have perceived how perfectly galvanic all this was
if I hadn’t happened to be standing where I intercepted the one look
she turned upon her mother.

“It was a look--it’s a strong word, but I mean it--of horror, the look
of one still incredulous over a betrayal. Something had happened to her
that had never entered into her calculations as a possibility when we
saw her in the summer-house this morning, although I thought she was
facing some rather queer possibilities then.”

I couldn’t bear to have it spun out any longer. “What happened?” I
demanded. “Get to the point, man, and tell me.”

“Nothing happened,” he said. “Nothing, at least, until after the scene
was over. They went ahead and had their rehearsal. I watched. I watched
all of them, even Alexander Corbin. Particularly I watched our young
friend Bill Grant.

“He had already had his surprise. But I swear I don’t know how he got
it. He hadn’t had a significant look or word, let alone an intelligible
message, either from his cousin or from Judy. And yet he looked like a
man in a daze. When it came time for him to produce the ring and hand
it to the bridegroom, a good stiff nudge was not enough to bring him
to. He had to be spoken to, and then he responded like a somnambulist.

“I simply can’t describe the intensity of the feeling that was shared,
in some inexplicable way, by Judy and those two young men. And what
made a nightmare of it was that no one seemed to perceive it but
myself.--Oh, Victoria may have been a little unnaturally alert. She’d
taken that look from Judy square in the face; though without flinching,
so that I wonder now whether she knew what it meant. To the others it
was simply the rehearsal of a wedding, to the usual accompaniment of
jokes and giggles.”

“How about Punch? Didn’t he see anything?”

“No, I don’t think he did. He was entirely serious, of course;
scrupulous about doing his part exactly as he was told. One of his
hands showed a tendency to stray into his pocket, but he corrected that
when his mother spoke to him about it. No, Punch had something else on
his mind and I don’t think he saw a thing.

“Yet I can swear that if those three people had been Italians, there’d
have been a flash of a stiletto. But who would have wielded it and
who’d have got it, I don’t know.

“Something did happen at last, just when the rehearsal was over. Some
one, perhaps two or three of them at once, said to Applebury, ‘Now’s
when you kiss her.’

“Judy turned to him and said, without any expression in her face at
all, ‘Are you going to? You can if you like, of course.’

“He went rather red and stood looking at her like a fool. Angry I
should say, rather than embarrassed. I don’t think he’d embarrass
easily. He has no misgivings about himself.

“She didn’t give him more than a second to make up his mind. Then she
reached out a hand for the other man. Some fool laughed and said, ‘Are
you going to kiss him instead?’, but nobody else made that mistake.
Something about her gesture silenced the lot of them.

“She said right out so that everybody could hear, ‘I’m going to talk to
Bill for five minutes, over on that bench.’ She nodded toward a stone
seat at the bottom of the lawn in plain sight, but out of earshot.
‘After that we’ll decide what we’re going to do next.’ She led young
Grant off to the bench and they sat down on it with their backs to us.

“There was some electricity in the air by then. I think that for a
moment Applebury considered following her, but he changed his mind
about it, and turned to Victoria. The others stayed together in a
group, as if they didn’t know what to do nor where to look.

“I looked frankly at the pair on the bench. They sat side by side, not
very close together though, and talked without looking at each other.
It didn’t last very long; less, I’m sure, than the five minutes Judy
stipulated. Then she got up, turned away from him, still without a
look, and came back toward us, he following.

“She looked to me then a perfectly live girl. The second act of _The
Tales of Hoffman_ was over. ‘It’s too late and too hot for tennis,’ she
said. ‘Let’s all go for a swim in the pool.’

“I heard Grant speak to her just before they got within the hearing of
the others. ‘I’ll think of something, yet,’ he said. She answered him
over her shoulder for anybody to hear that might. ‘All right, if you
can.’ He’d got over his surprise at all events and seemed to be coming
to life again, himself.

“He went into the pool with the others. So did Judy. So did everybody
except Punch and Bruce Applebury. One of the bridesmaids made quite a
point of it that Punch should go in; a personal appeal. But he refused
regretfully, and I knew why. His bathing suit hadn’t any pocket in it.

“I don’t know why Applebury didn’t go in. He looked hot and stuffy
enough after his day in town. Unless....”

Old Eagle-Eye’s face suddenly brightened and he slapped his lean old
leg. “Unless, by George, he had the same reason that Punch had, only a
better one. Do you suppose he had the real necklace in his pocket?”

“Damn the necklace!” I cried.

“Damn it by all means,” he agreed seriously. “But in the meantime we’d
better be dressing for dinner. You’re going, aren’t you?”

I told him dully that I didn’t think I would.

But after he’d gone up-stairs to change his clothes and pack, a servant
from The Oaks brought me a note from Judy that changed my mind.

“You must come to-night,” it said. “Not that you can do anything, but I
want you here.”




CHAPTER X

TRANSFORMATION SCENE


What Judy thought she wanted of me at dinner that night I don’t know.
Probably she didn’t know herself. She regarded me as an ally and may
have reasoned that some unforeseen change in the pattern of things
might make me useful. Or, more likely, she didn’t reason at all; just
felt that she wanted me there, and sent for me.

As things turned out, the part I played at the dinner was merely that
of a wholly unimportant spectator. The cue that called me upon the
stage wasn’t given me until several hours later. Neither during the
dinner nor after it did I have a moment alone with her.

I had a little talk with Punch, though, and got one curious piece of
information from him. That this happened was due to our somewhat too
prompt arrival at The Oaks. Belden had taken old Mr. Smith up-stairs
to show him his room, and the boy, who was the first one of The Oaks
party to appear in the drawing-room, seated himself on the arm of the
easy chair where the butler had deposited me, and brought his report
down to date.

“Have you still got it?” I asked.

He patted his trousers pocket confidentially.

“I didn’t forget to change it when I changed my clothes,” he told me,
“and I bolted my door and hung my coat on the door-knob. So nobody
knows where it is. Mother thinks it’s still in the safe. I don’t know
what I’ll do about it to-night, though, after I’ve gone to bed. Sleep
with my trousers on, I expect. Unless grandmother has me give it back
to her before then.”

“Have you any idea that she means to?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “of course you never can tell about Gran. She called
me into her room again just now and asked me if it was safe, and if I
had it hidden where I could get it when it was wanted. I said I could.
She’s coming down to dinner to-night, you know, and she may spring
something. I’ll be all ready if she does.”

He grinned and added, “It certainly will be a surprise for mother.”

“How do you know she thinks it’s in the safe?” I asked.

He hesitated, and I didn’t know for a minute whether he meant to
answer. His pride over what he felt to be a sound piece of reasoning,
and his wish to see whether or not I would follow it prevailed over any
other feelings he may have had.

“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “I figured it out from Digs. You see,
early this morning when I showed her that the necklace was back,
she was awfully excited and said she thought I’d taken it for a
joke--because I hated her, she said. She didn’t mean that really--it
was just because she was upset--and she came around later and said she
was sorry. So that was all right.

“But this afternoon just before they had the wedding rehearsal Digs was
all stirred up again. I saw she was acting sort of reproachful toward
me, so I asked her what the matter was, and she said she didn’t think
it was fair of me to have told mother about her knowing the combination
to the safe. She said she wasn’t supposed to know it, only she had to
in order to tell grandmother what it was when she forgot.

“Well, of course, I hadn’t told mother that Digs knew the combination.
I hadn’t told anybody but you and Mr. Smith. And I told Digs I hadn’t
told mother. And then, because it seemed kind of funny, I asked Digs
what made her think I had.

“She pressed her lips together--you know the sort of face she
makes--and wasn’t going to tell me.

“I said, ‘Mother hasn’t been accusing you of taking the necklace, has
she?’

“She was very indignant then, and said, ‘No, she has not,’ and then she
began to cry, and asked me if I’d miss her if she went away; because,
she said, she thought she might have to.

“I asked her why, and she wouldn’t tell me. So I said she mustn’t mind
grandmother even if she did get sort of rough sometimes, and Digs said
she didn’t mind grandmother. It wasn’t that at all. She wouldn’t say
anything more; wanted to kiss me instead. So I went away to think about
it.”

I remembered old Mr. Smith’s comment on Miss Digby’s manner just after
she’d parted from Victoria in the hall that afternoon. “Frightened--or
shocked,” he had said, and he had hazarded a guess that she might have
been given some order that she didn’t want to carry out. I didn’t
mention this to the boy, however. I waited to see what conclusion he’d
come to by himself.

“I think,” he went on, “that mother must have asked Digs to open the
safe for her; just guessed that she might know the combination. And the
only thing she’d want the safe open for would be to get the necklace
out. I don’t know why she wants to get it out, though, unless to put it
in some safer place. Or unless”--he hung fire a moment but he couldn’t
turn aside from the pursuit of truth wherever it took him--“or unless
mother doesn’t think Gran ought to give Judy the necklace and wants to
put it for a while somewhere so that she can’t. Anyhow, it makes it
sort of exciting about to-night, doesn’t it?”

I cordially agreed that it did.

I don’t think Victoria really expected me to come to the dinner, but
with a crowd like that--there were more than thirty of us--one more or
less couldn’t have mattered much. They solved the problem of my stiff
leg by putting me at a card table and giving me a spare chair opposite
for my foot. I had Punch on one side of me and his special bridesmaid
on the other. Either she was an uncommonly nice girl, or else the
cradle and the grave, so to speak, were her specialties, for apparently
she didn’t mind in the least having us for her partners. She was very
jolly anyhow and deserved a less divided attention than I was able to
give her.

The rest of the elderly group sat at a table by themselves; old Mr.
Ethelbert Smith at Mrs. Corbin’s right at the head of it, Alec at the
foot, and Victoria half-way down the side that faced me. The bridal
party, lacking the two who had been told off to me, sat, eighteen in
all, at an enormous table transversely to the room, Judy at the end of
it nearest me, with Bill Grant at her right and Bruce away down at the
other end.

The arrangement had its importance for me--by that same token it was
probably an unlucky one for the nice bridesmaid--since it put all of
the principal actors in the drama, or at least all whom I took to be
the principal actors, where I could watch their faces. Judy and old
Mrs. Corbin I saw in profile; Bill Grant, Bruce Applebury and Victoria
faced me squarely.

I didn’t neglect the others. One by one I studied them intently. One
of them, it seemed impossible to resist the conclusion, must have been
Punch’s man in pajamas, who, for some motive less explicable even than
the one that had incited the taking of it, had returned the stolen
necklace to old Mrs. Corbin’s room last night. Would the same man walk
again to-night, I wondered?

I think I know something of faces. They’ve been a serious part of my
study, at all events, for many years. But there wasn’t one within range
of my vision which I could associate at all with an act like that.

Anyhow, that didn’t comprise the whole story. That is to say, the
theft and return of the necklace did not. Otherwise it would not have
involved Judy. And there was no getting away from the fact that she was
involved inextricably.

She was not now perhaps, as I looked at her, quite the lifeless
mechanical thing, the talking doll, which old Eagle-Eye had described
her to have been at the rehearsal of her wedding, but she was still
a long way from any Judy I had ever known. She was laughing too much
and talking too hard. They didn’t converse decorously in pairs down
at that table, but called to one another back and forth down the
length of it, and oftenest of all I heard her voice, all aglitter, the
lovely sensitive shades quite gone out of it. Yes, she was entangled in
something.

But was it the necklace? The question asked itself so clearly and
suddenly in my mind that I started at it. Had Judy a story of her own,
which by pure coincidence had fallen thwartwise of the mystery of the
necklace? Was the wordless drama old Eagle-Eye had seen enacted this
afternoon between the girl and those two young men nothing but a plain
tale of common human jealousy? Could the riddle be solved on that
hypothesis?

“What _is_ Judy doing back there?” the nice bridesmaid asked me.
“You’ve been looking steadily past my shoulder without saying a word
for about five minutes, and I’m too curious to be polite any longer.”

“I’m afraid it’s I who’ve been too curious to be polite,” I apologized
contritely. “And she isn’t doing anything, really.”

I was going on expatiating, rather feebly I’m afraid, on the feelings
of an avowedly sentimental honorary uncle, when Mrs. Corbin cut me
short by calling aloud in her vibrant, imperious old voice to Punch.

“Come here!” she commanded the boy. “I want to speak to you.”

Everybody in the room seemed to realize that something was coming, for
Punch walked to her side in complete silence and we all heard what she
said to him.

“Go and get that thing I told you to keep for me. Get it and take it to
Judy.”

Her voice was harsh as she issued the order, and I saw her turn a
sardonic look down the table at Victoria. But nobody paid any attention
to that. They were all watching Punch, expecting, of course, that he’d
turn and leave the room. Instead, he walked straight toward Judy. His
grandmother’s voice halted him.

“Go and get it first,” she called.

“Oh, I have it here in my pocket,” said Punch. And he pulled out, on
the words, the same rather disgraceful handkerchief in which he’d
exhibited the necklace to us at the lunch table.

I stopped watching him then, and turned my eyes, once more, on Judy.
And, pearls or no pearls, she was the one to watch. The first look
that flashed into her face when she saw what her brother was bringing
her was one of an irrepressible disgust. She had damned the necklace,
before, and this look of hers damned it now. That was gone, of course,
in an instant, and by the time the others had turned to look at her,
she had ironed out her face into a perfectly correct expression of
pleasure over the receipt of a rather overwhelming gift--surprise and
delight beautifully mingled.

She lifted the thing daintily from Punch’s outrageous handkerchief,
felt for the ends, and fastened it around her neck. I saw her fingers
pause suddenly over the clasp, not so much as if they were baffled by
it, but as if all the activities of her body had been, for an instant,
frozen. Another instant and she had fastened the clasp, turned away
from the table, and was coming down the length of the room toward her
grandmother. She passed my chair on the way, but she had no eyes for me
in that moment.

The girl’s face was transfigured, her eyes were shining like stars. I
can’t help it if I am banal, it’s what they were shining like. I heard
her catch her breath in something like a sob as she walked by.

“Gran, you darling!” she cried. And rather to Mrs. Corbin’s
astonishment I think, she bent and kissed her squarely on her old mouth
before the old woman had time to turn her cheek. “Are they _really_
mine?” Judy demanded. “Do you mean you’ve _given_ them to me?”

“They belong to you, and to no one else,” Mrs. Corbin said. “Here! Give
Ethelbert Smith a look at them. He knew them long before you were born,
or your father, either.”

The girl turned to him dutifully, leaning forward so that they swung
away from her breast. I saw old Mr. Smith touch them with the tips of
his fastidious fingers, and then I looked at Victoria.

She wasn’t a beautiful sight. The change in color of her face had made
the make-up blotchy, and her eyes were as hard as stones. I’m sure
she wasn’t breathing. But old Mr. Smith’s voice came out suave and
untroubled.

“The Corbin necklace is one of the most beautiful strings of pearls
I know, my dear. And your young neck is worthy of it. I wish you
happiness.”

The other table broke up as Judy approached it. They all grouped around
her to look and go into raptures. That was my first impression at
least, but it was not quite correct.

Bruce Applebury expressed no raptures, and he fell back a little
from the group, seeming content to survey this marvelous gift to his
bride at long range. This might have been nothing, of course, but the
celebrated Applebury reserve.

But there was none of that reserve about his cousin, Bill Grant. That
young man didn’t even pretend to look. And he was scowling just as
he had scowled that morning when he and Judy had come upon me in the
summer-house. But nobody, of course, was paying any attention to him.

Eventually the tumult subsided and people went back to their places.
Bruce was watching Judy now. At all events it looked more like watching
to me than like the lover’s gaze one might have expected. She seemed
aware of his watchfulness and troubled by it, though not profoundly.
Exasperated perhaps says a little more accurately what I mean. The
brilliant glow of excitement was still in her face, and yet she had
fallen silent. Once or twice she darted a quick look at Bill Grant,
and at last she may have spoken to him under her breath.

Anyhow I found myself presently watching him, so that I was on the
spot, as it were, when his face changed too. It was like the lifting
of a fog. I saw him look down the table toward Bruce, and then back
at Judy. No, not at Judy; at Judy’s necklace. He was staring at it
now like one fascinated, and to my amazement his face broke into a
broad--but really a ferocious--grin. _His_ eyes were blazing now.

I gave up trying to entertain the nice bridesmaid after that. It really
didn’t matter. She was too excited about the necklace to care.

But for myself, I was in exactly the plight in which old Eagle-Eye
had found himself this afternoon. I had seen a drama played out under
my eyes, and what it was all about I hadn’t the remotest idea. And
I went home, once they’d got fairly to dancing, without any further
illumination. Judy, as I said, never came near me. Whatever situation
she’d foreseen which I might be useful in hadn’t come off. She had
something else on her mind now.

But this much I knew. Whatever Judy’s story might be, the necklace was
somehow the nub of it.




CHAPTER XI

WHEN I CAME IN


I got my cue at five minutes past four the next morning. I know what
time it was since I had, a moment earlier, switched on my light and
looked at my watch to see how much longer the night was going to last.
The sky would begin turning gray before very long, I remember thanking
heaven, and then perhaps I should drop off to sleep.

It wasn’t ten seconds after I’d switched out my light and dropped back
upon my pillow, when I heard my name spoken, almost beside my head, it
seemed, in a whisper.

I don’t mind admitting that if I’d had two practicable legs, I’d have
come clean out of bed in one jump. As it was I sat up and took out
my suppressed activity in thinking. The name that had been whispered
was not the one by which I had been baptized, nor even the familiar
nickname which almost every one calls me by, but a private diminutive
which Judy and Punch sometimes used as a mark of affection.

I’ve been sleeping, since I’ve been too clumsy to get up and
down-stairs on crutches, in a little room on the ground floor which my
gardener and his wife used to use for a dining-room. The floor of it is
hardly above the ground level, and the open window is low enough for
any one bigger than a child to look through, or for that matter, climb
in at. So there was nothing unnatural about the whisper, weird as the
effect of it had been.

When it was repeated an instant later, I answered in a low voice, “Come
around to the front door and I’ll let you in.”

I thought it was Punch come down to report some new and exciting
development that he couldn’t wait till morning to tell me.

Donovan slept up-stairs in a little room over the kitchen, the remotest
room in the cottage. I’d had a bell put in to summon him by. My
gardener and his wife, who was my cook, had moved out after the fire
to the second story of my garage. So if I could move quietly enough
not to disturb my nurse, my nocturnal visitor’s errand could remain as
confidential as he seemed to wish it to be.

I switched on the reading lamp in my living-room as I passed through;
then cautiously unlocked and opened the door. Two people were standing
on the door-step, but neither of them was the caller I had expected.
One of them was Judy, and the other was Bill Grant.

I don’t think, though, that I was especially surprised. Down in the
bottom of my mind I must have guessed a good deal more, during the
past two days, than I had allowed myself to admit. All the same I
felt pretty blank for a minute. I just stood there in the doorway and
balanced myself upon my crutches. My paralysis seemed to have infected
them too, for neither of them moved nor spoke.

At last I said, “You’d better come in.”

“Do you want us to?” Judy asked very quietly.

“Yes, of course,” I told her, and on the words I swung myself back out
of the doorway. “Come into the living-room,” I added, “and we’ll shut
the door, and then perhaps it won’t be necessary to let Donovan in on
it.”

Bill made me follow Judy inside, and it was he who closed both
doors--more quietly than I could have done.

I didn’t ask what they were doing or were planning to do. There is no
mistaking the sort of adventure upon which this pair were about to
embark.

“Sit down,” I said, “and tell me all about it.”

My voice was coming to life a little, but it was hardly satisfactory,
even to me, and I wasn’t surprised at Judy’s question.

“Are you on our side? Because there’s no use sitting down and talking
unless you are.”

I did sit down myself, though, in my easy chair and filled and lighted
a pipe before I answered. It was time, not tobacco, that I wanted.

“Of course I’m on your side, Judy,” I said at last. “I’ll be on any
side that I’m satisfied is really yours.”

Neither of them had followed my example about sitting down. Young
Grant was standing in front of my empty fireplace, his hands behind
him--locked together, if I could judge by the tension of his shoulders.
Judy, who had been wandering restlessly about the room while I got my
pipe going, now gave me a rueful sort of smile and came to rest on the
arm of my chair.

“You haven’t my best interests at heart, have you?” she asked with
slightly burlesqued apprehension. “You don’t want to save me from doing
something that I’ll always regret?”

The words and the manner may have been flippant, but the voice wasn’t.
Judy trusted me to understand seriousness without the label of a long
face, and I blessed her for her confidence in me.

I essayed a small joke of my own. “It’s no good your sitting in my
lap,” I told her. “I’m not old enough to be seduced that way. I want to
be satisfied which your side really is, before I fall in, that’s all.”

“You’re absolutely right, sir,” said Bill seriously. They were the
first words he’d spoken. “You ought to be told the whole story before
you’re asked to do anything, or even agree to anything.”

“No, he’s wrong, Bill,” Judy contradicted him over my head. (She hadn’t
stirred, by the way, at my jibe about sitting in my lap.) “He’s got to
decide first and hear the story afterward. Really the story hasn’t a
thing to do with it, except that he’ll be awfully interested in it--put
it in his collection, probably. He knows already, you see, that I mean
to marry you and that I’m not going to marry Bruce. Of course if he
thinks that because I’m still rather young I shouldn’t be allowed to
decide _anything_ for myself--which is a mistake that has been made
before....”

I saw Bill Grant smile ruefully at that and perceived that he himself
had made this mistake.

“... if he does think that,” Judy went on, “then, of course, he’ll
think I’m wrong anyhow, story or no story. But if he thinks I’m grown
up, then he’ll see that I’m the only person who can possibly know
whether you’re the man I ought to marry, or Bruce.”

“I’ll admit that you’re grown up, my dear.”

She kissed me briefly, and sprang to her feet.

“Well, then, it’s like this,” she said, turning and facing me very
earnestly. “Do you want to get into a whole lot of trouble that you
needn’t get into at all? Do you want mother to quarrel with you, and
grandmother to cut you out of her will, and a whole lot of people to
think you’ve been, well--seduced, you know, into doing something that
was perfectly frantically foolish? You needn’t, you know. You needn’t
let any of these things happen. That’s why I wanted you to decide
first. I wouldn’t have you persuaded. But I thought perhaps you’d--just
naturally--want to.”

I don’t know what answer I made; whether, indeed, in words I made any
at all. Judy was satisfied at all events, for she went over to her
lover, slipped her arm through his, and said, “I knew he would.”

Even at that moment I credited this young man with unusually acute
perceptions. He made no attempt to express any gratitude of his own, or
to speak for Judy in the matter of hers. He’d have annoyed me intensely
if he’d done either of these things. What he said was more to the point.

“It may not turn out to be quite so bad as Judy makes it look,” he
said. “We’ve a plan that will avoid a general explosion of scandal if
it works. It’s a near thing, of course, whether it works or not.”

“You’re an optimist,” I commented, “if you think you can run off with
Judith Corbin less than twelve hours before she was to have married
Bruce Applebury without causing a general explosion of scandal.” I was
as yet, you see, prepared to be amiable only in streaks.

Judy came back to the arm of my chair and patted me consolingly. “You
think so,” she said, “because you haven’t any idea how clever Bill
is.--Tell him the plan, Bill,” she added.

Young Grant stood very straight, and spoke rather stiffly.

“The essential thing about it is,” he said, “that we get married as
early as possible this morning, before the people at The Oaks are up
and about.”

“That’s what I told them we were going to do,” Judy put in, “in the
notes I left--one for mother and one for Bruce. I told mother that by
the time she’d read it we’d be married, but if she wanted us to, we’d
come back before anybody knew we’d gone and not let on that anything
had happened. I left the note in her room so that she’d have time to
think before she started anything.”

“But the wedding!” I gasped. “The marriage to Bruce in the afternoon!
What would you do about that?”

“Oh, they’d have to postpone the wedding,” Judy said easily. (I’m not
sure she didn’t speak through a yawn.) “Get up some excuse. You can
trust mother for that. Grandmother could be horribly ill. That would be
easiest, of course. The people would all go away, don’t you see, and
then when they’d stopped thinking about us, Bill and I could be married
again. There’s no law against that, is there?”

“But why be married now?” I asked. “Why not simply postpone the
wedding? The same excuse would serve.”

“Tell him, Bill,” commanded Judy.

“I know Bruce pretty well,” young Grant said, “and I imagine Judy
knows her mother. I don’t believe either of them would submit quietly
to anything less than the proved inevitable. And unless they made up
their minds to it instantly and put the excuse over--for all they were
worth--it wouldn’t be any good. If they know there’s nothing left to
argue about, they may plant their excuse at once and send for us.”

“Send for you where?” I asked.

Judy gave a guilty sort of wriggle.

“I had to let you in for it, a little,” she said. “I told mother that
as soon as we were married, we would let you know where we were, and
that if she wanted us to come back, she was to call up your house and
find out.”

“Where _will_ you be?” I asked.

Judy didn’t answer. She left my chair again and walked away, but not,
this time, to where her lover was standing; there was a moment before
she turned and faced me.

“Do you _want_ to get into this?” she demanded of me. She was intensely
serious now. “It will be beastly for you. Mother will hate you, whether
the plan works and they save their faces or not. We didn’t want to do
it this way, you know. At least, Bill didn’t. We wouldn’t have done it
if we could have helped it. I can’t marry any one else but Bill--not
now, and they--they haven’t left us any way but this. But you don’t
deserve to be--to be made the goat.”

I’d never seen tears in Judy’s eyes before, but they were there now,
and they brought a responsive blur into my own.

“I shall enjoy being the goat,” I said, “and I’ll double in any other
useful part that you can assign to me. How about it? Will you be
married here?”

Judy heaved a deep sigh of assent. “In this nice little house,” she
said. She turned to her lover. “It’s all right now, Bill.”

Bill Grant came over and shook hands with me.

“I can’t tell you what a relief it is, sir,” he said. “I didn’t want to
take Judy on a wild goose chase through the middle of the night looking
for a license clerk and a justice of the peace. I wanted it known where
she was. If I may leave her here with you, I’ll drive over now to the
county-seat and get a license as soon as I can wake up the clerk.”

“I’ll keep Judy for you,” I said. “But there’s no use in your starting
yet. It’s only a twenty-mile drive, and you can’t rout that man out in
the middle of the night. Sit down and be comfortable.”

“Do you keep anything to eat in your house?” Judy asked. “I’m hungry,
now that I can think about something besides eloping with Bill.”

I told her where to find the ice-box, and cautioned her to go quietly
in order not to waken Donovan. Bill went with her, and they came back
in a few minutes with three-quarters of a pie, and a bottle of milk. We
set out the feast on the little table beside my couch, and I watched
them eat, mercifully refraining from asking any questions. These babes
in the wood were as hungry as the wolves that would have devoured them.

But when we’d finished, and when Bill Grant and I had lighted our
pipes, I asked, “Now, haven’t I earned the story for my collection?
When did you two youngsters meet for the first time? Yesterday
afternoon?”

Judy curled up on my couch, happy as a well-fed kitten.

“Tell him about it, Bill,” she said. “I think I’m going to sleep. The
whole works, you know,” she continued. And by way of launching him she
spoke once more to me.

“Has mother told you about my horrible past? Well, Bill’s it!”




CHAPTER XII

AN EXCURSION INTO ARCADY


Of course I knew what Judy meant by her horrible past. The escapade
Victoria had told me about while she was trying to persuade me to help
her put the soft pedal on Alexander Corbin’s activities in the matter
of the theft of the necklace. She hadn’t, to be sure, so much told me
about it, as bounded it for me. It began, I knew, in Judy’s flight from
school and ended in the Martha Washington Hotel where Victoria had
found her, “looking as if she hadn’t found liberty as jolly as she’d
expected.”

The natural inference from this last remark of Judy’s was that it was
Bill Grant who had disillusioned her, who had reduced her to that
cynical acquiescence in defeat which I’d found it so hard to understand
in her. The appropriate thing for me to have done then, under the
traditional code, would have been to tell the young man he was a yellow
dog and order him out of my house. But the notion of doing anything
like that was so absurd that I smiled at him.

Bill misunderstood the smile.

“It’s quite true, sir,” he said soberly.

“He knows it’s true,” Judy remarked.

“You go to sleep,” he told her gently, “and don’t listen in. I want to
tell this my own way.”

But it seemed he couldn’t begin. He sat there taking his pipe in short,
sharp little puffs, his eyes unfocused, his thoughts astray all over
the area of the past. He seemed to be exploring for a path that would
take him through.

“To begin with,” I said at last, to help him out, “tell me who you are.”

“Well, I _am_ Bruce Applebury’s cousin,” he answered doubtfully.

“I don’t mean that,” I said.

“Tell him what you do,” put in Judy.

“Shut up,” he ordered, “and go to sleep.”

“I’m not an Applebury,” he then said to me, possessed of the thread
at last. “His mother and mine are sisters. Osborne, their name was.
We don’t see them much. Father, mother and I have traveled around
a good deal--a little like Henry James’ family, though I don’t mean
the results have been the same. Anyhow, until I went to college, my
education had been a catch-as-catch-can affair, never in one school
very long. Bruce, of course, did everything perfectly regularly, so I
didn’t see so very much of him. And after we graduated and he went into
the family bank, I saw him still less. I really know him pretty well,
though, and that’s important.”

I could see that it might be, but I wasn’t ready to go back to Bruce. I
remembered Judy’s comment, “Tell him what you do,” so now I asked him.

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed, “I try to write.”

“What do you write?” I asked.

“Why, I’ve tried my hand at pretty nearly everything but poetry,”
he told me. “When I met Judy, down in Easton, Pennsylvania, I was
traveling around on a try-out circuit, one-night stands mostly, with a
play of mine, trying to lick it into shape, as they say, and hoping it
would get into New York. It never did. It died out on the road. But I
wasn’t there when it happened. I left it in Easton.”

“Where you met Judy?” I suggested.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But not because I’d met her. I’d already made up
my mind to quit when that happened. I’d come to hate the thing so that
it made me sick. Every change they made in it made it worse, until I
hoped it would die on the road. If it had ever got in New York, I’d
have run like a rabbit.”

“Anyhow you _did_ meet Judy,” I persisted. “How did it happen?”

Once more his face was shiny with sweat, and he mopped it with his
handkerchief.

“Oh, it sounds rotten,” he said miserably. “You’ll think I ought to be
kicked, and I wouldn’t deny it. But then, you know Judy. You _do_ know
her, don’t you?” he shot at me fiercely.

“Yes, I know her,” I said. “Go on.”

“She was a waitress in the hotel,” he resumed. “One of these
coffee-shop places, you know, where half the town comes for lunch. I
talked to her over a meal or two. She’d been to see my play. One night
I overtook her on the street, and instead of going to that damned
theater, I went for a long walk with her.

“Of course I’d known from the first word she spoke to me that she
wasn’t an ordinary waitress.... Well--naturally. But I couldn’t make
her out at all. She wouldn’t tell me anything about herself. She gave
me a name to call her by, but she told me while we were on that walk
that it wasn’t hers.

“By way of playing the game I didn’t tell her anything about myself,
either. She knew my name, of course, but I let her think it was a _nom
de plume_. It was Osborne Grant on the programs, and I told her to call
me Bill. It got to be a sort of understanding that we took each other
as is, without explanations.

“You can’t imagine what it was like. Well, perhaps you can, but I’d
never imagined that anything like that could happen. It was the only
really romantic thing that ever had happened to me. And it was like
that from the very first moment.

“On that walk we took I told her I was going to quit the play. I said
I was so deadly sick of it that I couldn’t go on with it. I said I was
going to buy a Ford and go somewhere, disappear for a while--get lost.

“It’s hard to be sure you’re being honest telling about a thing like
that. I suppose I must have had it in the back of my head as an awfully
jolly possibility that she’d come with me. We talked about it at first
as a joke, and then she said to me suddenly, ‘Are you really joking?
Because if you aren’t, I’ll come.’ She said she was on a sort of tramp,
anyhow. She meant to work her way west, clear to the Pacific coast
perhaps.”

He broke off and looked at her. She was sound asleep now, and no
mistake. He went to the couch and drew a light blanket over her.

“She’s had a rotten two days,” he said, as he stood looking down at
her. Then he went back to his chair.

“You’ll find it hard to believe, sir,” he went on. “I find it hard
myself to believe it now. She looks like a little girl, asleep there.
But I really thought, then, that she was as old as I was. She seemed
harder. She seemed to have seen a lot of life. I don’t know how she
could put it on. It was a sort of defensive armor, I suppose. Anyhow,
I didn’t feel I was taking any advantage of her. And I didn’t expect
to be any Sir Galahad about it, either. I don’t know that I exactly
expected the other thing. I was just willing to let it ride. I’d only
just begun to know her then, you see.

“Well, I bought a Ford, and she quit her job and we started out. And on
that first day together I began to see what she was really like. She
kept getting younger, and, well--I don’t know any other word--sweeter;
taking off the armor, you know, as she tried me out and came to feel I
was all right.

“We went across Pennsylvania, through Lancaster and Gettysburg, and hit
the old National Trail in Maryland; followed it up into the Cumberland
Mountains. We didn’t get on very fast, because whenever we saw anything
we thought it would be jolly to stop and do--nice little brooks to wade
in; things like that--we stopped and did it.

“I did turn out to be, well--a Galahad, after all, though it wasn’t any
merit of mine. The thing just took itself for granted, the first time
we put up for the night. I won’t talk any brother and sister rot. No
brother and sister ever were like that. But we always slept in separate
rooms. We didn’t pay any attention to appearances, though. If the rooms
happened to be adjoining, it was all the better. We talked through the
door.

“That lasted a week. And then I couldn’t trust myself any further. We
were in love with each other, you see. Oh, we’d been that from the
first, but now each of us knew the other knew it. You know what _she’s_
like. She’d never welsh in her life. She’d go through with anything
that she started; perfectly reckless, if no one but herself was
concerned.

“Well, that was all right. We might have got married then and there,
and it would have saved a terrible lot of anguish if we had. But by
that time I’d come to. I knew how young she was--she’d given that
away--and I knew she was a runaway. She’d never told me her name, nor
what her people were like. I knew what they must be like, of course.

“Well, it struck me that I couldn’t look them in the face, nor Judy,
nor even myself, if I took advantage of a child’s escapade like that. I
hadn’t any idea of giving her up, but I thought I’d figured out a way
to square the thing. I wrote her a letter, and slipped it under her
door that last night, and bolted. It seemed the right thing to do, but
I knew by instinct I was being a fool all the time.

“I told her in the letter that I loved her, and always would, but that
I wanted her to go home to her own people and her own surroundings and
take a little while to think it over. I said that after she had thought
it over she was to make her choice.

“I said it was perfectly possible that when she found herself back
among her old friends, she’d think of this adventure of ours as
something perfectly insane. If it did seem like that she wasn’t to
worry. I’d never try to follow her up, and she could remember it as a
pleasant episode. Lord, what a fool I was! I might have known how Judy
would take that.

“I went on to tell her of course, that I loved her as I never would
love anything else in the world, and if she found she still loved me,
back home with her feet on the ground, she was to write me a letter and
I’d come like a shot. I signed it with my full name, of course, and
wrote out my permanent address. And then I wrote a postscript telling
her she wasn’t to have any regrets whichever way she decided it,
because she’d given me something....

“Well, you know how it is, sir. It looked all right on the page. I
thought I meant it; meant that I could be satisfied with what I’d had,
even if it stopped there. Of course I was a perfectly doddering fool.

“Oh, and I did one more fool thing. I didn’t know how her money was
holding out. I was afraid she might be completely strapped. So I put a
couple of twenty-dollar bills in the envelope to pay her fare home.

“I drove off in the night, and I turned back three times before
morning. I wish to God I’d gone all the way back, but I never did. I
hung on, somehow, to my fool idea.

“Well, of course I began watching for a letter from her within a week.
I didn’t know her handwriting nor what the postmark would be, and every
time I found a letter addressed in a woman’s handwriting, my heart
stopped beating--literally stopped, I mean, for one beat anyhow, and
there isn’t a thing the matter with it.

“After three months of that I was pretty nearly crazy. I couldn’t go
looking for her, you see. I’d sawed myself off that limb by promising
her that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t taken me at my word;
decided she’d done a perfectly crazy thing--which it was, of course,
by all her home standards--and was only hoping that I’d never turn
up to remind her of it. My mother saw I was half out of my head about
something, and persuaded me finally to go to Italy with her for the
rest of the winter. I made extra careful arrangements for my mail to be
forwarded, and went.

“I came back just in time for Bruce to ask me to be best man at his
wedding. I was a little surprised at his doing that, because we’ve
never been friends really, but he’s great on family, and going out,
as it seemed to him, into the wilds like this, he wanted to rally us
around and present a united front. I agreed to it, of course. I’d
nothing else to do.

“He didn’t talk about her much; never showed me her picture. Well,
he wouldn’t. I hadn’t had the slightest warning, not a hint, when I
got out of that car under the porte-cochère at The Oaks and saw her
standing there in the veranda.”

I had paid his tale the tribute of almost breathless attention, and
even now when he paused as if he’d come to the end of it, it was a good
while before I could find anything to say.

At last I asked a question. “Why didn’t Judy write to you?”

“She’d torn up my letter in a rage before she’d ever got as far as my
name and address at the bottom of it. Oh, naturally enough. Think of
the perfectly hellish jolt she must have got just from the sight of
those two damned twenty-dollar bills, and the knowledge that I’d gone!

“And the thing I’d really done wasn’t very much better. Do you remember
what she said just now, about thinking she was too young to be allowed
to decide anything for herself? That was the theory I’d gone on. I’d
taken the decision out of her hands.”

“It was the chivalrous thing to do,” I argued dubiously, but wasn’t
very much surprised when he flung the word back at my head.

“Oh, chivalry be damned! She deserved to have been taken in on it, all
right, and I ought to have known it. Lord, I’d had seven solid days of
her. She hadn’t acted like a silly kid out for a lark. I was a coward,
that’s what it came to. I was afraid if I told her what my plan was
that she’d talk me out of it and I’d cave in and be left looking like a
crook. Hell, there are times when a man ought to have courage enough to
_be_ a crook!

“But I wasn’t at the end of my chivalry yet, even when I saw her there
at The Oaks Thursday afternoon, saw her turn white and bolt into the
house, and found out she was the girl that Bruce was going to marry.

“I saw through the sprained ankle dodge, of course, and decided I
wouldn’t play tennis. I was hanging around the hall waiting for a sight
of her, when Punch caught me and showed me to my room. I did have a few
minutes with her afterward, when the others were out on the courts.

“But I was still trying not to look like a crook. I started out by
trying to tell her she needn’t be afraid, that I hadn’t known I’d find
her here and that I wouldn’t give her away.--Oh, I don’t blame myself
so much for that. I was rattled, naturally. But I’d lost my chance for
a talk that would get anywhere with her, and it began to look as if I’d
never have another.

“By the time that first infernal evening was half over (lord, it was
only night before last) I was desperate. I went off up-stairs and sat
down and wrote her another letter. She’d told me why she hadn’t written
me, so I had that much to go on. And of course I knew without any
question at all, that, regardless of what happened to me, she ought
never to marry Bruce.

“It would be a perfect crime, a marriage like that, for Judy. Bruce
isn’t a monster, nor a villain, nor anything like that. But he’s stiff
and self-satisfied, and bull-headed, and he hasn’t the imagination of a
good Ford car. He’d try to break Judy on the wheel without knowing he
was doing it.

“I don’t think he _could_ break her, but he might drive her to almost
anything.--Well, I put all of that and a whole lot besides, into that
letter, and then went out on the veranda where she was sitting and
handed it to her.”

“I’ll tell the world he did,” came a sleepy voice from the couch. “I
could have killed him. He explained afterward he thought I could tuck
it in my dress.”

“Well,” I asked, “why didn’t you?”

She opened her eyes and looked at me with a hopeless expression.

“What do you think we wear?” she asked me. “Corsets? All I had on, that
night, besides my shoes and stockings was a shirt and a step-in--and
my dress, of course. Where do you think the letter would have stopped
if I’d stuck it down inside?”

It came as a shock to me to realize that this time-honored repository,
consecrated by tradition to the implements of intrigue, love-notes,
keep-sakes, and so on, had become as obsolete as a sedan chair, but
there was no getting away from the logic of the facts.

Judy, still curled up on the couch, was broad awake now, and went on
telling me about it.

“I saw Bruce bearing down on me, so I shoved the letter down into that
silly Chinese vase that people are always dropping cigarettes into,
although I knew I’d have a fearful time getting it out. If I could have
been sure what line Bill had taken in his letter I’d have hung on to it
and seen the thing through with Bruce then and there. But I had to read
it first. So I climbed out of my window in the middle of the night and
got it and read it, and then spent the rest of the time until daylight
riding around on Punch’s bicycle, deciding what I’d do.

“Poor little Punch! I wouldn’t have cared except that he saw the whole
thing. He saw me hide the letter in the first place, and he knew when I
went out to get it. I don’t know what he thought.”

“I can guess what he thought,” I said. “He thought it had something to
do with the loss and the return of the necklace. That’s what I’d have
thought too, if he’d told me about it. Now it seems that the necklace
had nothing to do, from start to finish, with the whole affair.”

They looked at me and looked at each other. Bill drew a long,
heart-felt sigh of dissent.

“Hadn’t it just!” he said. “It was that infernal necklace that made all
the trouble, really.”




CHAPTER XIII

STUNG!


I saw, though, by the way he pulled himself up, that he wasn’t going to
tell me about it; not then, anyhow. He walked to the window, and then
looked at his watch.

“I’m off,” he said decisively. “It’s almost broad daylight now, and I
don’t want to waste any time getting things started.”

“You can’t get a public official out of bed in any such ungodly hour as
this,” I protested.

But he was oddly determined about it.

“I can keep on trying till I do,” he assured me.

So I gave over the ungrateful rôle of obstructionist and started in to
help.

“You’ll want a parson as well as a license,” I pointed out, and named
a man who I thought might be willing to serve. “He’s quite a nice
young chap, new here in the village. He’s been out to see me three or
four times since I’ve been laid up--out of pure amiability, nothing
professional about it--and we’ve become pretty good friends. I’ll give
you a card to him. You can tell him your story, and if he wants any
confirmation that I can give him, he can call me up. He won’t mind
getting up early, so on your way back with the license you can stop and
bring him along. You’ve a car, haven’t you?”

“Quite a good one,” said Judy. “I don’t know whose it is.”

Bill looked a little startled at that. Then he grinned. “Oh well,” he
said, “what’s one small sport roadster among friends? I’ll bring it
back all right.”

Judy went, but no farther than the door, to see him off.

“You know, I like Bill,” she said, in the thoughtful manner of one
announcing a discovery, when she came back into my sitting-room. And
she wouldn’t agree, when I laughed, that there was anything funny about
it.

“It’s an entirely different thing from being in love with him,” she
insisted. “He’s got what they used to call--in old-fashioned novels,
you know--delicacy. I’m sure I know why he was in such a hurry to get
off. It was because we’d got around to the necklace, and he doesn’t
like to talk about it. He didn’t want to hear me tell you about it,
and he knew I was going to. It is a dirty sort of story, of course,
but--well, there it is. You want me to tell you about it, don’t you?”

“Lord, _yes_!” I cried. Really, I don’t like whitewash much better than
she does. I added, “I could hardly bear it yesterday when old Mr. Smith
came back to the summer-house and kept you from telling it then.”

“I didn’t know it, then,” she said. “Not the worst of it. The real
worst of it hadn’t happened.

“You know I told you--when was it, Wednesday morning when I came over
here?--what a jolt mother had got over the newspaper story that Gran
was going to give me the necklace? Well, that night, just before
dinner, after Gran had told her that she really was going to give it to
me, mother told me that she was in trouble about it.

“You see, about a year ago, Gran had given her the necklace to take to
town to the jeweler to be cleaned and restrung, and mother had had an
imitation necklace made then. She told me she’d done it because the
real one was likely to be stolen any time out of that silly old safe
Gran kept it in, especially now that she was taking so much dope and
forgot to lock it half the time. She put the real one in the bank,
she said, where it would be safe, and brought the imitation back to
grandmother. It got by with Gran, all right. She never suspected a
thing.

“But she told me if Gran did give it to me for a wedding present it
was likely to be found out that it was an imitation. What she wanted
to do was to go back to town next day and get the real one out of the
bank and put it back in the safe, instead of the imitation, so that
Gran shouldn’t know that an imitation had been made. If Gran ever found
that out, she said, there was no telling what she’d do. She’d probably
disinherit Punch and me by way of getting even with mother, especially
after Uncle Alec had come back and made up their quarrel.

“Even if she didn’t do that, mother said, Gran would be sure to make
a perfectly frightful row and accuse her of having tried to steal the
necklace, which would be pretty rotten right in the middle of the
wedding, with the Appleburys there and all.

“Mother said it was harder to get the necklace out of the bank than it
had been to put it in. There were more formalities about it, especially
since it had come out in the paper that Gran was going to give it to
me. Mother wanted me to write a note, to show to the bank, saying that
Gran had given me the necklace and that they were to let mother take it
out.

“I didn’t want to do that because she hadn’t given it to me, and I
didn’t more than half believe she really would. I didn’t believe that
until last night when she did. She’d promised to give it to mother a
dozen times.

“Mother and I rather quarreled about that. But at last we made it up.
She said she’d go and try to get the bank to give her the necklace
anyhow without any note from me, but that if she didn’t get it and Gran
did give the imitation to me, I was to take it and hand it right over
to her; refuse to wear it, you know, and not give anybody a chance
to look at it, not even Bruce, and especially not old Mr. Smith whom
grandmother said she’d invited to the wedding. Because, of course, he’d
spot it for an imitation in a minute.

“I was glad enough to agree to that. I didn’t want to wear the beastly
thing. Mother went back to town Thursday morning to try to get the bank
to give her the necklace, but didn’t succeed.

“Well, and then Bill came the same afternoon and I forgot all about the
necklace. He’d driven me pretty nearly wild in that first little talk
with him. The only question I wanted to decide was whether it would be
better to run away then and there with Bill, or to stay and go through
with the program, only marry Bill instead of Bruce when the time came.
Bill didn’t see it that way at all. He was still being--chivalrous, you
know, like he said.

“So when grandmother sent for me to try on the necklace and there was
nothing there but that silly empty box, it struck me as rather funny. I
shouldn’t have laughed, of course.

“It seemed such an ideal way of settling mother’s troubles that I
wanted to let it ride, just as she did. We didn’t care whether Gran
had hidden it somewhere and forgotten, or whether it had really been
stolen. If it had, it was a joke on the thief, that’s all. All we
wanted was to keep Uncle Alec from sending for the police, which would
have made a lot of trouble, especially if they got it back and found it
was only an imitation after all. Well, you got him quieted down, and
that seemed to be all right.

“I read Bill’s letter by the light of Punch’s bicycle lantern that
night and saw that he felt the same way that I did about everything. He
didn’t want me to marry Bruce, anyhow. All we needed was a good long
talk, which might be rather hard to manage, of course, and we’d work
everything out.

“Then, awfully early yesterday morning, mother came in in her
nightgown, half wild, to tell me that the imitation necklace had turned
up again in grandmother’s room, and that Mr. Smith was coming that
morning. She accused Punch of having taken it, and called him a little
fiend for bringing it back.

“She came back about an hour later, though, a whole lot calmer and said
she’d got everything fixed up. Bruce was going into town, she said, to
get the necklace. He’d told her how to work it and she’d given him the
sort of note the bank wanted. He’d be back with it on the three o’clock
train in time for the rehearsal.

“She wanted me to get up and dress right away and drive Bruce to the
station, but not go in town with him because he’d be awfully busy and
I’d be in his way. She told me not to say anything to him about the
necklace. She wanted the crowd to think I’d gone in with him, though,
so that his going off like that wouldn’t look queer. I was to keep out
of sight wherever I pleased till it was time for his train to come
back. And she said she’d fixed Mr. Smith so that he wouldn’t come to
the house till dinner to-night.

“Well, of course it would have looked fishy to me if I’d thought
about it at all. But the only thing I thought of was that here was a
perfectly heaven-sent chance for my talk with Bill. So I sent a note up
to him and told him where to meet me.

“We went up to the summer-house, thinking it would be the safest place
there was, and found you there with old Mr. Smith. He’d seen us through
his field-glasses, of course, and we must have given him something to
think about. But it didn’t seem to matter much then. We got away as
soon as we could and had our talk.

“Bill was stubborn about it. He wouldn’t hear of my marrying him,
then. The only thing to do, he said, was to call off the marriage
with Bruce. He wanted that and my marriage to him, he said, to be two
separate things. I told him he wanted to be sure he wasn’t getting me
on the rebound. But of course that wasn’t fair. I can really see how it
looked to him. He’s--well, he’s like that.

“So what we agreed on was that I was to meet Bruce at the three o’clock
train and drive him around a while before we came back to The Oaks
and tell him that I wasn’t going to marry him; I’d do anything else
he wanted, except that. He could throw me over any way he liked, tell
any story he wanted to tell. If he wanted the thing done quietly, I’d
pretend to be awfully ill, or grandmother could, and the wedding could
be postponed.

“It was a perfectly rotten position to put him in, and it wasn’t his
fault that he was in it--at least it wasn’t his fault any more than it
was mine. I’d never told him I was in love with him. I had told him
when he first asked me to marry him that I’d been in love with some
one else, but I said I didn’t know where he was and that he was out of
my life altogether. Of course I thought that was true. He said he’d
take a chance. Well, I was going to have to tell him that the chance
turned out to be that the man had come back, neither by his fault nor
mine, and that we were in love with each other. It never struck me
as possible that Bruce would want to marry me when he knew that. You
wouldn’t think it was possible, would you?”

“Yes, my dear,” I told her regretfully, “I’m afraid I would.”

“Well,” she conceded, “you know more about life than I do.

“I met him and we drove off down the Yorkville Road, and I told him the
whole thing. He didn’t say a word; just sat there looking blacker and
blacker every minute till I’d finished. And then the horrible thing
happened.

“He told me he’d been stung. He told me what had really happened about
the necklace. And the minute he began talking I knew it was true.
He told me mother had really taken it--he used perfectly horrible
words: ‘fraudulently hypothecated it.’ That means she’d pretended it
was hers and got the bank to let her have some money on it; a lot of
money--twenty-five thousand dollars. She’d tried to raise the money
to get it back and she couldn’t. And when they found out that the
necklace wasn’t hers they’d threatened her, Bruce said, with a criminal
prosecution. Of course she was almost crazy with worry about it. So
she’d gone to _him_, to _Bruce_, and asked him to put up the money to
get the necklace back.”

That was more than I could listen to in silence.

“She went to Bruce!” I cried. “Good God!”

“I suppose she couldn’t think of any one else to go to,” Judy said
thoughtfully. “It had to be some one she could absolutely count on to
keep it quiet. He’d hate a scandal in his family worse than anything
else in the world, and of course mother thought, and so did he, that I
was as good as married to him.

“But when he had paid the money to the bank and got the necklace, and
then found I didn’t mean to marry him, he felt that he’d been, as he
said, stung. Even the necklace wasn’t his, he said. It was practically
stolen goods. It had belonged to grandmother all the time. She could
have made the bank give it back to her without paying back the money,
just by proving to them that mother hadn’t had any right to give it to
them.

“Oh, I can see now how he felt about it. I suppose for any one like him
it was the natural way to feel. But I couldn’t see anything then. I’d
just gone dead, like a flat tire.

“We went along for miles after he’d told me that nice little story
without saying a word, either of us. Then I told him I’d marry him
if he wanted me to. I said it seemed that I’d already been sold to
him. I couldn’t see any other way out. I couldn’t pay him his beastly
twenty-five thousand dollars, and I didn’t know any one I could ask for
it--not for a thing like that.

“I didn’t begin to hate him till then. I’d hated myself, and hated
mother. But when I told him I’d marry him because he’d paid me----
Oh, I told him more than that too. I said that he could do anything
he liked with me, but that I loved Bill and would go right on loving
him.--And after I’d told him all that, he began to get--_amiable_.

“He said he’d known he could trust me to do the right thing. He’d been
sure all the time I hadn’t known what mother had asked him to do. He
said it was a foolish fancy that I was in love with Bill. That I’d get
over it as soon as we’d been married a little while. He said he was
acting for my own good and what I needed now was a little firmness to
keep me from leaving the rails and making a hash of my whole life. He
said he was sure we were going to be happy together.

“I didn’t say anything at all; just hung on and kept from jumping out
of the car. That’s how we got back to The Oaks.

“Of course the minute Bill saw the satisfied look in Bruce’s face he
knew I’d fallen down on him somehow. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d
expected me to do, and he was pretty well upset. So after the rehearsal
I took him off in front of everybody and told him what had happened. I
didn’t have time for the details, of course, but I told him Bruce had
paid for me in advance.

“He wanted me to postpone the wedding, anyhow, and give him time to
raise the money himself. I told him I wasn’t going to be auctioned
off any more, let alone to him. He says now that he saw the point all
right, but he wouldn’t admit it then. The last thing he said was that
he’d think of a way yet, and I told him it was all right if he could.
He’s terribly clever, but I don’t believe there was any way, except the
one that happened.”

“What did happen?” I asked. I’ll admit my mind wasn’t working very
well. It was too boiling hot.

“Why,” she cried, “you were there! You saw it happen. Gran gave me the
necklace, right before everybody. Didn’t you hear me ask her if it was
_really_ mine, and hear her say it was? It was only the imitation one,
of course, but she thought it was the real one. The real one was right
in Bruce’s pocket where it belonged. So all I had to do was to tell him
to keep the necklace. That’s what I said in my note to him. And poor
old Bill didn’t see it for about five minutes after it happened.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. I could see how horribly tired she
was--could any one wonder?--and I suggested presently that she go back
to my couch and take another nap while we waited for Bill to come with
the parson and the license. She took to the suggestion readily.

“We’re supposed to be pretty wild,” she observed, referring, I suppose,
to her generation, “but I don’t believe we like it quite as wild as
this. It’s over, anyhow. There isn’t anything more that can happen
now.”

With that, being the perfectly healthy young animal that she was, she
fell contentedly asleep.

I’m not so young and my nerves don’t bear stretching so easily. So for
a good while I sat watching her, thinking over the story she’d told
me, fitting it in with what I’d already known of the queer series of
happenings which had so disturbed and mystified me during the past
three days.

I had it all now, hadn’t I? Well no, not quite. I didn’t know yet
who’d stolen the imitation necklace in the first place and then
incomprehensibly brought it back. It didn’t matter much, though, did
it? Old Eagle-Eye thought it did. Probably old Mrs. Corbin herself
had mislaid the necklace or hidden it somewhere, perhaps under the
influence of her drug, and under the same influence, restored it, the
way it happened in _The Moonstone_.

Yes, but how about Punch’s man in pajamas?--Oh, well, Punch might have
dreamed him.

With dreams in my mind I must have fallen asleep myself, just then, in
my chair.

What wakened me was the persistent ringing of a telephone bell. It
hadn’t wakened Judy, so I hobbled over to the instrument as quickly as
I could and answered it.

“This is Alexander Corbin,” I heard the voice say. “I’m afraid I’ve
wakened you. I want to tell you that Bruce Applebury was robbed last
night of the Corbin necklace.”

“Robbed!” I repeated stupidly. “How?”

“He tells a very queer story. He came to my room with it just now. I’ll
give you the details later. I’m talking on Victoria’s phone. She wants
me to ask whether you happen to know anything of the whereabouts of
young William Grant?”

“Not precisely,” I said. “I can give you some news of him, though.
Shall I come up to The Oaks?”

“I wish to heaven you would!” Alec exclaimed. “And the quicker you get
here, the better.”




CHAPTER XIV

A POINT OF HONOR


I heard a sudden move from Judy on the couch and looked around at her.
She was sitting bolt upright, gazing at me wide-eyed.

“Has something happened to Bill?” she asked.

“No, it’s Bruce,” I said. “He was robbed of the necklace last night.”

“But why did you say anything about Bill?” she persisted.

“Your mother wanted to know whether I could tell them where he was. It
was Alec who talked to me.”

She was still looking rather wild-eyed, like one under some nightmare
apprehension. Indeed I thought the shadows of the sleep she’d just
awakened from must still be clouding her mind a little. The fact was,
of course, that she was thinking straighter and faster than I.

“Which necklace do you suppose it was,” I asked, “that Bruce was
robbed of; the real one or the imitation?”

“The real one, of course,” she said. “It’s the only one he had. He
brought it home from the bank, you see, and when mother couldn’t get
the imitation away from Gran, in order to put the real one in place of
it, Bruce said he thought it would be safer if he kept it and if nobody
knew he had it. Nobody did know he had it but mother and me.” She made
a full stop there. Then, “And Bill,” she added. “Of course I told him.”

She swung her legs off the couch as if about to spring to her feet, but
arrested the action half-completed. She was thinking, I could see, with
an agonized intensity, and I found myself now upon the trail of her
thoughts.

“Your mother must have read your note,” I observed. “That’s why she had
Alec ask me if I knew where Bill was. You wrote a note to Bruce, too,
didn’t you? How did you deliver that one?”

“I had Bill take it into his room,” she said, “after he’d gone to
sleep. That’s what we waited for. That’s why we were so late getting
away.”

It’s Judy’s order that this story isn’t to be a whitewash, so I must
in common honesty forbear to apply the brush to myself.

I didn’t, even for one grisly moment, believe that Bill was the thief;
that his elopement with Judy had been a mere pretext and that he was
speeding away now to parts unknown with the necklace in his pocket. But
I perceived the plausibility of the pattern his actions made.

It wasn’t merely that he had known Bruce had the necklace, that he’d
gone to Bruce’s room when Bruce was asleep, and that he and the
necklace were now gone. There were some queerly confirmatory details.
He hadn’t been willing to consider eloping with Judy until he knew
Bruce had the necklace. He had been at some pains to leave Judy in my
hands as soon as possible after they’d got out of the house. It had
struck me that he’d been rather unreasonably in a hurry to set out on
his quest of the license clerk. He’d shown a dislike of hearing the
necklace discussed; had run away--this was Judy’s own explanation--from
hearing her story of its adventures.

I didn’t believe that any of this nightmare nonsense really explained
anything, but I did find myself wishing, with a kind of prayerful
intensity, that he would come back now with his parson and his license.
How long had he been gone? What time was it anyhow? By the clock on the
mantelpiece it was quarter to seven.

“Look here, Judy,” I said. “I told Alec I’d come right up to The Oaks,
and I’ll go as soon as I can dress and get up there in my car. But
there’s no reason why this should interfere with your plans.”

She looked at me in pitiful bewilderment.

“What are my plans?” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Your plans for getting married to Bill,” I explained. “You wait here
till he comes back with the license and the minister. Get Donovan and
the gardener and his wife for your witnesses. Go ahead and marry Bill.
And then--well, do just as you like. Start off on your wedding journey,
or else stay here. After I’ve seen how the situation looks at The Oaks,
I can telephone to you, if you’d like me to, and you can come back just
as you had planned, and pretend that nothing has happened. I didn’t
tell Alec you were here. All I said was that I could give some news of
Bill.”

“I can’t be married to Bill now,” she said. “Not till Bruce has got the
necklace back.”

I started to say that I didn’t see the connection, but she broke in
upon me with a savage intensity.

“Don’t you see, it’s the necklace that bought me off. Mother bargained
me for it, and I gave it to him and got clear. Now he hasn’t got it.
It’s been taken away from him. And I can’t marry Bill till he’s got it
back. I’m--I’m caught in a trap.”

And indeed, her eyes had the panic in them that I’ve seen once or
twice, in those of a trapped animal. It was unbearable to see little
Judy looking like that.

“Let’s try to keep our feet on the ground,” I said, “and see where we
really stand.

“You gave those pearls to Bruce in good faith. You told him in the note
that they were his. That lets you out. Suppose he hadn’t been robbed of
them last night but were to have his pocket picked of them to-morrow in
town. You wouldn’t feel that bound you to turn yourself over to him.
Well, what’s the difference?

“Neither you nor Bill had anything to do with the robbery. You _know_
Bill didn’t. You know that from no conceivable motive, sordid or other,
would Bill touch that necklace. He’d have done anything to defend
Bruce’s possession of it, for it was his release as much as it was
yours.”

I saw tears spring into her eyes and she came over to me, kissed me
briefly, and went back to the couch. “There are two of us, then,” she
said, “--and I guess there’s Punch; that makes three.”

She was counting up, I knew, the people who were on her side.

“And old Mr. Smith,” I added. “I think you can count him in.”

She looked a little surprised at that and I went on:

“Not for any emotional reason. Simply because he’s so damned
intelligent. The advantage of knowing as an axiom that Bill was not the
thief is that we can count intelligence on our side.”

I couldn’t feel that this had impressed her very much, but she was
quieter anyhow, and she was giving me a hearing.

“And it seems to me,” I went on, “that another advantage of our
certainty of Bill is that it makes it possible for you to marry him
first and tackle the problem of the necklace afterward.”

She smiled at that. “Bill wouldn’t marry me even if I asked him. And
I won’t ask him. I should, of course, if I were a little bit in doubt
about him, or if I were afraid he’d think I was. But we aren’t like
that. We’re---- Oh, you can’t talk about it. Look: you know what it’s
been like at home, don’t you, ever since--well, ever since father died?
Even Punch has hated it, and it hasn’t been so bad for him because he
can’t remember father. And they treat a girl worse anyhow.

“I’ve never been educated. I don’t know anything. I’ve been _trained_.
When father owned a racing stable he used to breed race horses. Well,
I’ve been brought up like that. I hated it so that at last I ran away.

“But I didn’t know _why_ I hated it until I met Bill. Of course
I’ve known honorable people before, but never anyone that I’d had a
chance to see all the way through. It’s different, and it’s going
to be different. When I go with him I’m not going to take any of
mother’s--bargains along with me.”

I’ve never been very enthusiastic about Victoria, but I felt that I had
to come to her defense here.

“I’m not in your mother’s confidence,” I said to Judy, “but there’s
something I don’t think we can lose sight of. Victoria’s had a pretty
rotten time herself since your father died. She’s got a small income
of her own and she could have been comfortable and independent on it
if she’d been willing to give in to your grandmother’s ideas about
bringing up you two children. They may have been better ideas than her
own, but she didn’t think they were. She took on what’s turned out to
be a long battle, as she saw it in your behalf. If she got herself into
money difficulties so desperate that she was driven to hypothecate the
necklace, she did it so that she could give you what she regarded as a
fair chance.”

“I’m glad you told me that,” Judy said, after a moment of blank
silence. “At least I think I am. But you see it ties me down all the
tighter. I’ve got to keep her bargain--one way or the other.”

“You don’t mean,” I cried, “that you’d marry Bruce _now_!”

She nodded.

“But I’m not going to do it,” she said. “We’re going back to The Oaks
and find that necklace. You ring for Donovan to come down and help you
dress. I’ll leave a note for Bill, and then I’ll go up to the garage
and get out your car.”




CHAPTER XV

BLACK LOOKS


We made up for lost time once we got started. It wasn’t much after half
past seven when we got to The Oaks. Alec was waiting to let us in, and
he was flabbergasted at the sight of Judy. Evidently Victoria hadn’t
been giving out any more information than she considered necessary. He
started two or three exclamatory interrogations, but left them all in
the air. He probably realized that a thorough answer to any question
would take longer than he had time for just then.

Judy asked him, “Where’s Bruce?”

“He’s with your mother up in her sitting-room,” Alec told her.

At that Judy went straight into the house, leaving him to accompany my
slower progress on my crutches.

“I think Victoria is mad,” he told me confidentially. “The necklace is
gone, and she won’t let me make any move toward finding it. Applebury
seems to believe that his cousin has levanted with it, and if that’s
so, it’s perhaps a case for negotiation rather than for ordinary police
methods. But to me that theory seems fantastic. Don’t you agree with
me?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’d be willing to bet all I’ve got that Bill
Grant hasn’t stolen the necklace.”

“Then, in heaven’s name,” he implored me, “convince Victoria if you can
that the thing to do is to commence a search--discover if any of the
servants have disappeared. If this were my house I’d put a cordon of
the farm laborers around it and not let any one get out until we’d had
time to satisfy ourselves that the necklace wasn’t inside.”

By that time he had run me up in the elevator and piloted me to
Victoria’s door.

“No, I’m not going in,” he said. “I’m going to stay outside and keep my
eyes open, anyhow.”

I thought when I first went in that Victoria was alone in the room.
Certainly Judy was nowhere about. I didn’t know what had become of her.
Just as Victoria spoke I saw Applebury standing in the big bay window
gazing moodily out.

“Well, what have you got to tell us?”

Victoria’s voice was jerky with frayed nerves and I didn’t really
hold her to account for her bad manners. But they produced a certain
responsive stiffness in my own.

“I don’t know anything about the robbery,” I answered, “beyond the bare
fact that Alec gave me over the telephone.”

“Where’s Judy?” she asked. “Do you know that?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s here. She brought me up to the house. I expected
to find her in this room.”

“Is she married?” Victoria asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

It wasn’t until then that Applebury turned around and looked at me. I
got the impression that my answer had startled him.

“I take it my cousin didn’t come back with her,” he said. “You don’t
know where he is, too, do you?”

“Not precisely,” I said. “I believe he’s out hunting an early rising
parson to marry him to Judy.”

“Why hasn’t he got Judy with him then?” Victoria asked. “And why did
she come back here with you?”

“I think I’d rather let Judy answer those questions,” I told her. “I’ve
come to see if I can be of any help about recovering the necklace.”

“Your best assistance in that respect,” said Applebury, “would lie in
telling us, if you can, where and how we can get in communication with
our departed guest.”

“I don’t think there’ll be any difficulty about that,” I said. “But I’d
like to be told first what happened last night.”

I realized that he was so angry that he could scarcely speak. He turned
away from me now with a gesture of hardly repressed fury and left the
answer I asked for to Victoria. She took it up.

“Bruce went to bed last night with the necklace under his pillow. We
thought it would be safest in his care provided nobody knew he had it.
No one was supposed to know it but Judy and me.

“Apparently she told Bruce’s cousin, because Bruce was waked up some
time in the middle of the night, by a little noise, probably, and saw
there was a man in his room standing in front of his bureau by the head
of his bed. A man in pajamas. Bruce spoke to him, and it turned out to
be William Grant.

“He said he couldn’t sleep and was out of cigarettes and had come in
to get some. Bruce said there were some on the bureau, and told him to
make a light so that he could see. His cousin said, ‘No, I’ve found
them, thanks,’ and went back to his own room.

“That was all there was to it. Bruce went back to sleep and waked up
before half past six. He felt under his pillow and found the necklace
was gone. He looked in his cousin’s room and found that he was gone
too. He went out into the billiard room and saw that Alec’s door was
open, so he went in and told him about it. Alec came straight to me and
I had him telephone to you.”

So that was the way they meant to tell the story, was it, with Judy’s
note left out? Well, if they meant to fence with me, I’d fence with
them.

“Have you any idea,” I asked Applebury, “that Bill came into your room
for any other purpose than to get the cigarettes?”

He turned upon me with an angry grin.

“It seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it,” he retorted, “that he came to
get the necklace?”

“It doesn’t seem obvious to me,” I said. “Indeed, I find it hard to
believe that you’re making a charge like that seriously.”

“He’ll find that it’s serious,” Bruce predicted. “And I think you’ll
find that most people regard the inference as obvious.”

“Not if we succeed in finding the real thief.”

“Since you’re so sure young Grant is innocent,” Victoria put in,
“I should think you’d be willing to tell us your version of his
performance last night.”

“I’m perfectly willing to do that,” I answered.

It was declared war now between Victoria and me plainly enough. I
couldn’t have been neutral if I’d wanted to. So I went the whole hog.

“He eloped with Judy, and they came straight to my house. They told me
they meant to be married as early this morning as possible. I agreed,
after I’d heard the circumstances, that it was the thing for them to
do, and offered my house for them to be married in. Bill went off to
get his license and his parson, and Judy waited with me for him to come
back with them. It was while we were waiting that Alec telephoned.” I
stopped for a long breath and then went on.

“My proposal to her was that she wait at my house and marry Bill,
according to plan, when he came back. She refused to do that for
reasons which I won’t undertake to explain, left a note for Bill, and
came back with me.

“I promise you there will be no difficulty about finding him. He’ll
come back to my house and then he’ll follow on here. When he appears
here is only a question of how long it takes him to get his license and
to find his parson. In the meantime I suggest that we set about trying
to find the person who stole the necklace.”

Victoria’s only comment was, “You’ve always hated me, haven’t you?”

The barest possible denial was the only answer that I had to make to
that.

Bruce had more to say.

“Of course,” he remarked, “if Mrs. Corbin wishes to go through the
motions of searching for the necklace, there’s no reason why she
shouldn’t. But it won’t be found till my cousin, at some time that
suits his convenience, produces it.”

“Apparently,” I observed, “you’re not one of his friends.”

His dark face flushed a little darker.

“I’ve never pretended to like him,” he said. “But he’s the nearest
relation I’ve got, and I wanted to be on terms with him if possible. It
has seemed more possible lately. I had the idea that he was settling
down. That was my mistake. He’s always been an anarchist; done what he
liked, had what he wanted. He’s never been under any decent discipline.
This performance of his is like him enough, though it goes far beyond,
of course, anything I’ve known him to do before.”

“Which performance do you refer to?” I asked. “His eloping with Judy or
his supposed theft of the necklace?”

“Both,” he said.

“Let me be sure that I understand you. Do you think he pretended he
wanted to marry Judy in order to steal the necklace? Or that he had
meant to marry her and on the spur of the moment took the necklace
instead? In either case I assume that you’re not expecting him to come
back.”

He hesitated, then said, “I don’t see why he shouldn’t come back. In
fact, I dare say he will. He’d see no reason why he shouldn’t have
Judy and the necklace as well. He’s had plenty of time to hide it
somewhere. He can come back now and submit to a search with all the
innocence in the world. He can marry Judy and be safe. Don’t you see
the beauty of it? Once he’s married to Judy, he’s committed no crime at
all. It’s her necklace, and he’s her husband. He figured that out, no
doubt, before he came into my room.”

“I take your point,” I said, “but I shouldn’t call it beautiful.”

I was almost too angry to speak. Later I was to experience a certain
feeling of sympathy for Bruce Applebury, but I wasn’t aware of it then.

“Victoria,” I said, “you certainly know Judy better than to accept any
such monstrous theory as this. Judy and I know that Bill Grant isn’t a
thief. She’s come back here because she wants the thief found. It’s a
point of honor with her that he shall be found. Won’t you put matters
in Alec’s hands and start a search?”

I don’t know what she’d have answered, for there was a knock on the
door just then, and Punch came in. He was a desolate, pitiful little
figure, white-faced, big-eyed, desperately serious.

“Grandmother sent me,” he said. “She wants you to come into her room.”

“How does _she_ happen to be in on this?” Victoria demanded wildly.
“Punch, have you been telling her about it?”

He confronted her panicky anger very steadily. He was much more adult
in that moment than she.

“She called me in and asked me what had happened,” he said. “She’d
heard people moving about and Uncle Alec talking to me in the hall. I
told her the necklace had been stolen again. From Bruce. She told me
to go and send Judy to her, and I wouldn’t because I knew Judy wasn’t
there and I didn’t want Gran to know that she’d gone. But she made Digs
wheel her into Judy’s room. She saw Judy wasn’t there, and then she
came back. Just after that I saw Judy coming in, so I told her to go in
and see Gran. I waited outside the door, and after a while Judy came
and said Gran wanted to see you and Bruce.”

“I’m glad she’s found out about it,” Bruce said. “Now perhaps we can
get somewhere.”

Victoria gave him a baleful look. I think at that moment she hated
everybody in the world. There was nothing to be said, though. That
summons could not be disregarded.

From the door she threw back a look at me. “You may as well come along
too,” she said.

It wasn’t a very cordial or even courteous invitation but I made it
serve.

Punch hung back to help me.

“You were a true prophet, Punch,” I said. “You predicted big trouble,
and here it is.”

“I didn’t think it would be as bad as this,” he admitted.

“You look as if you’d had a night of it,” I commented. “How did you
know Judy had gone?”

“She had the necklace, you see,” he said, “so I was keeping watch on
the davenport the way I did the night before. And I saw her go out, her
and Bill. They didn’t know I saw them. So then I waited to see if they
wouldn’t come back. I was afraid I might go to sleep, so I walked up
and down the hall here most of the time after they went. I’m glad she
has come back,” he added. “I knew she would.”

Alec was patrolling the hall now, and he joined us.

“Did you get anywhere with Victoria?” he asked.

I shook my head. Then we both turned to see who was coming down from
the floor above.

It was old Mr. Smith. He was dressed as carefully as if it had been ten
o’clock in the morning, and he looked as if he hadn’t a care in the
world. I don’t suppose he had, really. He was too old, too detached. He
could be intensely interested in our plight without experiencing any
painful emotions whatever over it.

“I understand the necklace has been stolen,” he said as he came up.
“How about it, Punch? Have you seen anything more of your man in
pajamas?”

“No,” Punch told him mournfully.

“What’s that about a man in pajamas?” Alec demanded.

“It appears to be a private ghost of Punch’s,” old Eagle-Eye answered
easily. “It walks when things are happening to the necklace.”

“Well, I saw a man in pajamas last night,” Alec said, a little
embarrassed. He wasn’t quite sure whether old Mr. Smith was joking or
not.

But the old man turned that penetrating beam of his upon him and asked
him crisply:

“Where did you see him? And when, if you know?”

“I haven’t an idea when,” said Alec. “I saw him come out of the
bathroom in the Club.”

“What sort of pajamas did he have on?”

“Oh, ordinary pajamas.”

“You didn’t notice whether there was a tear in them; one of those
three-cornered tears, as if they’d been caught on a nail?”

“No,” said Alec. “I didn’t notice them at all. I didn’t notice him at
all. Why should I? He was just one of the guests coming out of the
bathroom in the middle of the night and going back to his own room.
There wasn’t light enough to recognize him by and it didn’t occur to me
to try to. I was in my room with the door open. Naturally I didn’t come
out to see which door he turned into.”

We had come to a halt just outside Mrs. Corbin’s door.

“We mustn’t keep Madame waiting,” Mr. Smith said. And then he asked
Alec, “Are you coming in to join the council of war?”

“No,” Alec told him impatiently, “I think not. There has been too much
consulting about this business, and I shan’t be needed in there. I’d
rather stay outside so that I can have some idea of what’s going on in
the house.”

“I think you’re quite right,” said Mr. Smith, and he reached out and
patted him approvingly--or so, at least, I interpreted the gesture at
first--not quite on the chest, a little around to the left. Evidently
his intelligent fingers found something, for he again expressed
approval. “Good!” he said. “I’ve got one of them on, myself.”

Then he knocked on Mrs. Corbin’s door, and at her summons we both went
in.




CHAPTER XVI

THE GENTLE ART


It was a big, dim, carpeted room, with long windows hung with heavy
curtains and lambrequins. Excessive light and noise were carefully
guarded against. There was a brown marble mantle, and all the tables,
big and little, had brown marble tops.

The old lady, in her wheel chair, sat at the far end of the room,
facing us as we came in. Judy--my first glance around had been to make
sure she was there--sat drooping a little, but in an unusually formal
attitude for her, on the couch in the corner. Bruce was in another
corner sitting--evidently by command, and not liking it; one could see
he’d rather have been on his feet--bolt upright on a hard little chair.
Victoria, trying to look at ease and not succeeding very well at it,
had seated herself near one of the windows.

The old lady greeted me with ceremonious courtesy, thanked me for
having come, and directed Miss Digby to place a chair for me. Her
greeting to old Mr. Smith was less formal.

“I thought I might need you as an expert, Ethelbert,” she said. “But I
doubt now if I shall.”

Then she told Miss Digby she could go and waited in dead silence until
the door was closed behind her.

Sad and humiliating as old Mrs. Corbin’s bad periods must be--those
times when, as Judy said, she was not presentable--it was already
evident to me that at this particular early morning hour of this
particular day she was as good as ever. I felt my spirits rising a
little as this realization came home. Somehow I was counting another
addition to Judy’s phalanx. I don’t know why I felt that the old
matriarch would be on her side. There was nothing in Judy’s forlorn
appearance to warrant such a conclusion.

She opened with heavy artillery upon her daughter-in-law.

“It seems to me, Victoria,”--her voice crackled like sparks out of a
coil--“that I have allowed you to make a mess of this business about
long enough. I’m going to see what I can do with it myself.”

“I haven’t regarded the mess as of my making,” Victoria retorted
coolly enough--a little too coolly not to betray the fact that she was
frightened. She’s always been afraid of old Mrs. Corbin. “However, I’ll
be glad to see what you make of it.”

“Punch tells me ...” the old woman began again, and looked around as if
in search of him. “I wanted him in here,” she threw in, “but it doesn’t
matter.--Punch tells me that the necklace has been stolen again.”

Victoria nodded.

“It was taken last night, from Bruce ...” she began.

The old woman interrupted her. “I asked if it had been stolen, and you
say it was. That’s enough for the present. If it was stolen last night,
I’d like to know what this is.”

She stretched out a hand which had been lying in her lap and opened it.
I jumped, and I think most of us did, for there dangled the necklace.
Well, wait a minute;--a necklace, anyhow.

“I found it,” she went on, “in Judy’s room this morning. Judy herself
wasn’t there. She was running away, I understand, with her new young
man. But she’d left this behind her, lying among the litter on her
dressing-table like a string of glass beads. I assume it’s not the
necklace that was stolen, but Ethelbert here will tell us, no doubt,
whether it is or not, if you care to refer it to him.”

“No,” Victoria said dully. “It’s an imitation I had made a little more
than a year ago.” She added with a spurt of anger, “You knew that all
right, didn’t you? I suppose Judy’s been telling you all about it.”

“Let Judy alone!” the old woman rapped out. “She’s told me no secrets
that weren’t her own.”

She turned from Victoria and addressed herself to Bruce Applebury,
abandoning as she did so a good deal of her harshness of manner.
Indeed for her she spoke almost gently. I scented danger for him, but
apparently he did not.

“Judy tells me,” Mrs. Corbin said, “that when she ran away with your
cousin last night she meant to marry him. She says she’ll marry him now
if the necklace can be recovered, but that if it can not be recovered,
she stands ready to marry you. A wedding is a bargain, and it takes
two to make it. Are you still willing to marry her?”

“Yes,” Bruce said. “Certainly. That’s all I ask; to go on as if nothing
had happened.”

He glanced toward Judy, but she gave no sign of having heard him or of
even knowing that he was in the room.

“She understands that, I think,” he went on a little less confidently.
“We talked it out pretty thoroughly yesterday afternoon.”

“The necklace hadn’t been stolen then,” the old lady remarked. “Where
was it?”

“It happened to be in my pocket,” Bruce said. “I’d gone into town to
get it and she met me at the train.”

“Whose was it then?” Mrs. Corbin asked him.

The question obviously took him aback and he repeated it stupidly. She
flung it back at him. “Yes, to whom did the necklace belong then?”

“I understood,” he said, “that it belonged to you.”

“You’re perfectly right,” she assured him grimly. “It did. And last
night at dinner I gave it to Judy. It was my intention, at least, to
give it to her, and give it I did, although it wasn’t the thing she
put around her neck. The real necklace was hers last night. But whose
was it when it was stolen, Mr. Applebury?”

He perceived the pitfall now, but too late to keep from plunging into
it. He was neither a naturally endowed nor a practised liar.

“Why--it was hers, I suppose,” he said.

“Hadn’t she given it to you?”

He flushed deeply. “I hadn’t accepted it,” he said.

“Do you believe your cousin stole it?” she asked.

“That’s not a pleasant conclusion to come to,” he told her. “But it’s
hard to see how one can believe anything else.”

“Don’t palaver,” the old woman snapped at him. “Do you believe he stole
it?”

Bruce hesitated, looking acutely unhappy, but at last he said, “Yes, I
do.”

“Judy doesn’t,” Mrs. Corbin returned. “She says she’d marry him now
if the necklace could be recovered. She wouldn’t marry any one she
believed to be a thief. But she seems to feel that you have a right
either to her or to the necklace. If she can’t produce the necklace,
she’s bound to marry you. Is that the way you look at it yourself?”

“That’s a perfectly unfair way of putting it,” he protested.

She gave a short grim laugh.

“It’ll serve well enough I think,” she said.

In the next breath she pounced upon him again.

“Victoria had pawned the necklace, of course. Did you redeem it for
her?”

“Yes,” he admitted sulkily, “I did.”

“How much did it cost you?” she asked.

He told her, “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“That was very handsome of you,” she observed, not satirically, but
quite as if she meant it.

He started to tell her he’d been glad to do it, but before the words
were half uttered, she’d turned to Victoria.

“Did you tell Judy,” she asked, “that you had come down on her fiancé
for the money?”

“No,” Victoria answered, “of course not.”

The gathering cloud of the old woman’s anger was a positively appalling
thing to watch.

“Then,” she said at last, turning back to Bruce, “you must have told
her yourself.”

You couldn’t deny the possession of a certain stiff sort of courage to
that young man. He stood up to her.

“Yes,” he said, “I told her. She’d met me at the train with the
information that she’d planned to jilt me for that worthless cousin
of mine. I’d engaged myself in good faith to marry her. I’d come out
here with my friends and my family to do it. And then, here on the day
before the wedding, she wanted to cry off.

“I’d advanced a substantial sum of money to her mother on the
supposition that the wedding was to take place. I thought it was only
fair she should know it. She took the same view of it that I did, and
agreed to marry me. I didn’t suggest--it would have been unthinkable,
of course--that I take the necklace as an alternative.”

“The necklace wasn’t hers at that time to offer as an alternative,”
Mrs. Corbin pointed out. “I hadn’t given it to her then. When I did,
she gave it to you--by word of mouth, or did she put it in writing?”

“She left a note last night,” Bruce told her, “in which she said that I
might keep the pearls. But apparently my cousin didn’t agree to that
disposal of them.”

“And, that being the case, you’re willing to marry my granddaughter?”

The biting irony in her voice could not be ignored, but he answered
stiffly, “Yes, I am. But I think your insinuation is outrageously
unfair. You seem to be trying to make it appear that I’m to blame for
all this. I’ve come out here to keep my part of a bargain, and all I’m
asking, as a matter of simple justice, is that your granddaughter shall
keep hers. I haven’t deceived anybody nor lied to anybody, nor tried to
take unfair advantage of anybody. It seems to me that the shoe is on
the other foot.”

“You needn’t worry about simple justice,” said the old woman grimly.
“You’re going to get it. When you told that child that you’d redeemed
the necklace for her mother you practically told her you’d bought her.
But I’m not willing to let her go at that price. She’s worth more than
you paid, just as the necklace is. You shall have your money back as
soon as I can write you a check.”

There’s no doubt at all that Bruce felt himself abominably ill used.
He hadn’t transgressed his own code in telling Judy the obligation
her mother had saddled her with. He considered, no doubt, that he was
acting magnanimously in forgetting, so to speak, Judy’s adventure with
Bill. He must, of course, have been passionately desirous of her or he
wouldn’t have done that. But there was a hotter fuel for his anger than
all this came to, I think.

This was the knowledge that in another particular he had transgressed
his code. It was his hatred of his cousin that had betrayed him into
it. One can imagine that this hatred must have been latent for years.
He’d spoken of him to me that morning as an undisciplined anarchist
who had done what he liked, had what he wanted. The care-free
grasshopper--don’t you see?--viewed by the laborious ant and never
overtaken by the winter.

His discovery, early that morning, that Bill had taken Judy
away from him had driven him to an act that demolished his own
self-righteousness. As I said before, I really pitied him when I
understood. That wasn’t my feeling at the present moment, though.

His face had gone livid with anger under the lash of the old woman’s
last words. He sprang to his feet.

“Very well,” he said. “I can’t dispute your right to discharge the
obligation in that way. But that’s not going to be the end of it. If
your granddaughter wants to marry my cousin, she’ll have to marry a
proclaimed thief. He may never be sent to jail for what he’s done. That
decision’s in your hands too, I suppose. But the story of it shall
follow him as long as he lives.”

There was a furious retort on the old woman’s lips, but it was checked
by the quiet tones of old Mr. Smith.

“Augusta,” he said (I’d never heard her addressed by that name before,
and it made me jump), “have I your permission to take a hand?”

She nodded without a word, and sank back with a sigh into her chair.

Old Eagle-Eye turned to Bruce.

“Please sit down again,” he said persuasively. “I don’t think we need
be violent about this. The suggestion I wish to make is that you make a
beginning at once and tell us the story now. I’ve heard no account of
the robbery myself, and I don’t think Mrs. Corbin has. If there really
is a clear case against your cousin, we’d like to hear it.”

Disarming as his voice was, I don’t know that Applebury would have
yielded if the old man hadn’t added, “Of course you’d want to tell
it, at least for once, in the presence of any of us who might have
contributory testimony of our own to offer.”

“I’m not afraid of any contributory testimony,” Bruce said. “Yes, I’ll
be glad to tell it.”

I felt, as he went ahead and detailed in a painstakingly literal
manner, without comment and without betrayal of passion, the incident
which Victoria had related to me a little earlier, that it made at best
a terribly damaging story. It seemed to me just as it seemed to Judy
that it was refutable only by the discovery of the actual thief. Not
even Bill’s return--lord, how I wished he would come, though--could
clear him of the shabby crime Bruce was charging him with.

Even old Mr. Smith betrayed, as he listened, the nearest approach to
excitement he was capable of. His manner was calm enough, but his eye
had the old irrepressible eagle gleam in it. It seemed to me that Bruce
had gone as fully as possible into details, but there hadn’t been
enough of these to satisfy the old gentleman. He took Applebury back
over the story from the beginning.

“You’d gone to bed somewhere about two o’clock, wasn’t it, with the
necklace under your pillow, and fallen asleep? Did that happen at once
or did you have any trouble getting off?”

“I lay awake a while,” Bruce said. “I don’t know how long.”

“Everything was quiet then, was it? Bill hadn’t kept you awake by
moving about?”

“No, it was quiet. I think he got to bed before I did.”

“And there was no light in his room?”

“I didn’t see any.”

“So you had no reason to think that he wasn’t out of the way until
morning,” Mr. Smith commented.

Bruce didn’t dissent to that.

“Well, then,” the old man went on, “you fell asleep. Deeply?”

“I’m a fairly sound sleeper,” said Bruce.

“And you didn’t waken till Bill came into the room?”

“I think not. No, I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Do you know what waked you up?”

“I haven’t an idea--some noise, I suppose. I don’t know that it was
that. It may have been some movement about my bed.”

“Such as a hand under your pillow?” suggested Mr. Smith.

“It may have been that,” Bruce agreed grimly. “As I say, I don’t know.
I found myself awake.”

“You don’t think Bill had spoken to you from his room before he came
in?”

“I’m very sure,” said Bruce, “that he did not. He was standing there,
in his pajamas, close by the head of my bed, rummaging over the top of
my bureau.”

“He’d left a light on in his room, I suppose,” Mr. Smith suggested,
“and the door was open behind him?”

“I don’t know about the door,” said Bruce. “There was no light coming
in from his room. There was no light at all except what came in from
outdoors.”

“You didn’t instantly recognize him, then?”

“Naturally not. I asked who it was.”

“And he replied that it was Bill and that he’d come in for some
cigarettes?”

Bruce nodded. He seemed to be getting bored with all these repetitions.

“And you suggested that he turn on the light?”

“We’ve been over all that,” Bruce said impatiently. “Yes.”

“His voice sounded perfectly natural and matter-of-fact?”

“I suppose so,” Bruce admitted. “Yes, I can’t say that it didn’t.”

“So you had no impression whatever of anything furtive or stealthy
about his way of coming in?”

“I don’t think I’d say that,” Bruce objected. “I think it _was_ rather
stealthy. I know that it struck me at the time as rather queer that I
hadn’t heard him coming in.”

“You are sure you were perfectly broad awake when you did see him
there?” Mr. Smith asked.

“Yes, I’m sure of that. I think my asking him why he didn’t turn on the
light shows it.”

The old man nodded gravely. “Yes,” he said. “I think we may regard that
as conclusive.”

I got a sort of thrill out of that, and looking over at Judy I saw
she’d got it too. But I didn’t, even then, know what he was driving at.

He went on in a somewhat thoughtful tone.

“So he took his cigarettes and went away, closing his door after him, I
think you said. And you once more dropped off to sleep. And that’s the
story.”

He sat in thoughtful silence over it for a moment.

Then he looked straight at Bruce and asked, “Mr. Applebury, was the
necklace under your pillow at that time?”

Bruce returned his gaze with a frightened stare.

“In the light of what I’ve found out since,” he said, when he could
make his voice come, “I think it’s natural to assume that it was not.”

“I asked,” said Mr. Smith, and now his voice was like a shining sword,
“I asked for your personal knowledge. Was the necklace under your
pillow when your cousin went back to his room?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce said. “It was gone in the morning anyhow.”

“We’ll come to the morning presently. Mr. Applebury, let me ask you to
consider what you’ve told us.

“You’d gone to bed guarding a priceless thing which was in some danger
of being stolen. You had chosen to guard it by putting it under your
pillow, where by a touch, by the smallest movement of your hand,
you could assure yourself from time to time of its safety. You were
startled out of a deep sleep by the presence of an unknown man in your
room, a man whose entrance, by your own statement, had seemed stealthy
and unexplained. You didn’t know who he was until he spoke in answer to
your question.

“Do you pretend to assert seriously that your hand never moved under
the pillow to discover whether the necklace was still there?”

Bruce sprang to his feet.

“Look here,” he said, through colorless lips, “I’ve been insulted far
enough.”

“Sit down,” commanded old Eagle-Eye. “I’m going to insult you a little
further. You’ve made a statement which the mind of a child would reject
as preposterous. I make the counter-statement that you did feel under
the pillow; that you knew that the necklace was there before your
cousin had had time to tell you who he was; that unless it had been
there you would have raised an outcry upon the spot. You dropped asleep
contentedly after he had gone back to his room because you knew it was
still there.”

There was a moment of dead silence. Bruce didn’t even try to speak.
I felt, after the first flush of crude triumph, something painfully
humiliating in the spectacle of as complete a demolition as that, even
of one I’d been regarding as an enemy.

Judy felt it too. She sprang up and ran to the window where she stood
looking out. I could see the tears running down her face--partly from
relief, of course, over the clearing of her lover, but partly, I think,
from pity. She had no disposition to gloat over him, anyhow.

Mr. Smith was the only one of us who remained unmoved. He hadn’t
completely finished.

“Now we’ll come to the events of this morning. I don’t know, Mr.
Applebury, where the necklace was when you wakened. It may have been
taken by a thief after you had dropped asleep again. Or it may have
still been under your pillow.”

Bruce had found his voice again. “Do you mean to insinuate ...” he
began.

“Not at this moment,” interrupted Mr. Smith. “I’ll do my insinuating a
little later.

“As I said, we don’t know where the necklace was when you waked up
this morning. But we do know that upon your bureau, left there by your
cousin, Bill Grant, was a note from Judy telling you that you might
keep the necklace, and that at that price she was quit of you.

“We know that his actual errand to your room was to leave that note;
that it was for this purpose that he had undressed and gone to bed and
waited for you to fall asleep.

“We know with what feelings you regard your cousin. It doesn’t want
much imagination to picture you as furiously angry, as anxious to
avenge the humiliation you felt he had put upon you. The fact that your
cousin had been in the room during the night and that he had now left
his room and the house, offered you an apparently easy revenge.

“Now I’ll make my insinuation, if you like. We have nothing but your
unsupported assertion that any robbery whatever has taken place. You
lied in accusing your cousin of the theft, and I find it easy to
believe that you have lied in declaring that any theft occurred.”




CHAPTER XVII

SOME MUST WATCH


I looked at Bruce in astonishment. In everything but the bare form of
the words he had been accused of having, himself, stolen the necklace,
and it was amazing the way the accusation had brought him back to life
again. His moment of collapse was past. His face was afire with anger.
He turned upon me.

“I decline to rest under this infamous charge,” he said. “I insist upon
being searched at once; that my room and my effects be searched. That
necklace was gone when I waked up this morning.”

He turned upon Mr. Smith. “You can’t accuse an honest man of theft and
get away with it.”

“I’m glad you’ve made that discovery,” the old gentleman replied
quietly. “However, I haven’t made a charge. Nothing but the same sort
of insinuation which you made against your cousin. The necklace may
have been stolen after he and Judy left the house last night. I’m
inclined to think it was.”

“Have we got to go on _talking_?” Bruce demanded of me. “Can’t we go in
my room and begin the search?”

It was rather pathetic, his turning to me like that. Relatively, I
suppose, I seemed like a friend. It’s a fact that I was sorry for him
and that I believed he knew no more of the present whereabouts of the
necklace than I did.

Old Eagle-Eye was in charge, however, and I referred to him for his
consent. He gave it by rising, with a bow to old Mrs. Corbin.

“I think we’d better adjourn up-stairs,” he said. “That’s the real
field of battle anyhow.”

“You’ll come too, sir, won’t you?” Bruce asked me. And when I agreed,
he handed me my crutches and helped me to my feet.

“I’ve never been searched before,” he remarked gloomily as we rode up
in the elevator together. “I’ve never even seen a man searched.”

“I never have either,” I confessed nervously. I think I dreaded the
ordeal almost as much as he. There is something rather horrifying about
the idea.

But we might have spared our apprehensions, for the search, as it
happened, never came off.

The elevator shaft on the top floor opens directly into the billiard
room. Bruce opened the door when the car stopped and stepped out,
but since there was a slight inequality between levels, he turned
back instantly to caution me about it. I swung myself out without
difficulty, but I all but lost my balance and fell back into the car
from sheer astonishment at what I saw.

“Good lord!” I gasped. “Punch, what in the world are you doing?”

Mr. Smith was at my side in an instant, and his right hand went under
his coat, even before he saw what I was looking at.

The little boy never turned his head. He was standing beside the
billiard table, covering with his trusty rifle one of the closed doors
down at the end of the room. He was still very pale, but his eyes were
shining now, and his hands were steady.

“Look out,” he said quietly. “He’s in the trunk closet.”

“Who is?” Bruce demanded. “What do you mean?”

But Mr. Smith asked no questions. He whipped out the automatic pistol
from under his coat.

“It’s all right if you’re sure he’s there,” he said. “I’ve got the door
covered too.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure,” said Punch. “I saw a drop of oil on the hinge.
That’s how I know.”

“Any other way out of it than through that door?” Mr. Smith asked
briskly, but speaking low as the boy had done.

“No,” said Punch. “It’s an awfully big place. It goes clear around the
corner. But that’s the only way out, unless he’s made a hole in the
roof.”

“They’re slate shingles,” Mr. Smith observed. “He’s still in there,
then.”

“What are they talking about?” Bruce demanded of me.

“The thief’s in there,” Mr. Smith told him. “Punch’s ghost, the man in
pajamas. Look here, can you shoot quick and straight if you have to? If
you can I’ll give you this pistol. I’m going to open the door.”

He held the weapon out to Bruce. “With my apologies,” he added.

“Thanks very much, sir,” said Bruce. “But I’ll open the door myself.”

Mr. Smith nodded.

“Stand to one side when you do,” he cautioned him. “Don’t get in our
line of fire.”

“If he’s the man who stole the necklace,” Bruce remarked, “you won’t
have to shoot. Not if I can get my hands on him.”

I don’t very much mind admitting that my own emotions combined a
lively curiosity about that door whose oiled hinges had indicated it
as the robber’s hiding-place, with an intense desire to get back into
the elevator. Try participating in a scene like that upon a pair of
crutches before you allow yourself to feel too contemptuous over this
admission.

Bruce had already started for the door, but he couldn’t go in a
straight line to it because of the corner of the billiard table. Before
he could get around this obstruction a new voice spoke and halted him
in his tracks.

“Really there’s no need for any sort of violence,” it stated,
irritably. “I’ll open the door myself. I’ll hold my hands out before
me and you’ll see that it won’t be necessary to shoot. That’s quite
understood, is it?”

“Perfectly,” Mr. Smith agreed. “We won’t do anything impulsive. Open
the door.”

The door swung open noiselessly, and there, true to his promise, stood
a man holding out a pair of empty hands.

His appearance is rather hard to describe, since the obvious facts
about it seemed fortuitous and somehow contradictory to the truer ones.
He was, for example, unmistakably dirty and disheveled. Yet he looked
as if he ought to be scrupulously clean and tidy. You felt that it was
contradictory to his nature to go more than twenty-four hours without
a shave, although a shadow of colorless beard upon his plump cheeks
proclaimed that he had done so. He was plump, although he happened
just now to be rather haggard and hungry-looking. His suit of clothes
was cheap and shapeless, yet something about him proclaimed him a fop.
His grimy hands were small and finely formed, and as fastidious as Mr.
Smith’s.

His glance shifted swiftly from one to another of us, coming to rest at
last in sour contemplation upon Punch.

The boy had been gazing at him intently, groping for an identification.
Now he got it.

“Why,” he cried, “he’s the man who was hanging the new window shades.
He must have been in there ever since Wednesday.”

That afforded me a grin. I turned to Mr. Smith. “That’s been Punch’s
theory from the beginning, you know,” I remarked. “He discussed with me
Wednesday morning the danger that one of the artisans about the place
would conceal himself in the house and steal the necklace when he got
a chance. He spent most of that day and the next patrolling the house,
trying to guard against that very thing happening.”

“Good for Punch,” said Mr. Smith, but in so preoccupied a tone that it
fell far short of the handsome acknowledgment I wanted for the boy’s
cleverness.

I persisted, speaking now to Punch. “I wonder if you were right about
the actual moment when the imitation necklace was taken?”

Without pausing I put the thing up to the burglar. “Was it Thursday
afternoon about two o’clock, just before the guests got here, that you
made your raid on Mrs. Corbin’s safe?”

The man didn’t answer. But to put it this way doesn’t at all describe
what happened. It was utterly preposterous. This trapped little rat of
a thief, haggard, grimy, unshaved, tried to make me feel--and almost, I
swear, succeeded--as if I’d just spoken to a duke to whom I’d not been
properly introduced. He did it with a perfectly impassive face and an
almost imperceptible turning of the shoulders.

But at that, old Mr. Smith got what he’d been looking for.

“Raglan, by George!” he exclaimed. “This is a real pleasure. But man,
I’d hardly have known you!”

The thief showed no reciprocal delight in the recognition. Indeed his
look of disgust deepened. But he spoke for the first time since he’d
opened the door.

“Really,” he said, “I should hope not. I’ve been living in that filthy
box room three days, feeding on a particularly nasty sort of American
milk chocolate. I haven’t been able to shave since Thursday night.”

He spoke with a marked British accent, which didn’t, however, satisfy
my ear. It was just about as good an imitation, I decided, as
Victoria’s Japanese pearls.

“Horribly unpleasant, I should think,” Mr. Smith agreed sympathetically.

Then he explained to the rest of us. “Mr. Raglan is not only one of the
most expert gem thieves in the world; he’s also admitted to be the best
dressed man in his profession.”

Bruce Applebury wasn’t in a sympathetic mood. He made no acknowledgment
whatever of the honor of the introduction to so eminent a craftsman. He
said to Mr. Smith, “We must call the police at once, of course. Shall I
telephone?”

“Oh, there’s no hurry, I think,” said Mr. Smith. “It’s still
frightfully early.”

He turned to the thief. “Raglan,” he said, “I’m going to propose a
bargain. You produce the necklace; save us the trouble of a search for
it. If you’ll do that, I’ll take the liberty of promising you, although
I’m merely one of Mrs. Corbin’s guests, a bath and a shave, a change of
linen, and a really good breakfast. All that before presenting you to
the police--and the photographers.”

“Done,” said Raglan, without a moment’s hesitation. “Thanks very much.”

He slid his right hand under his coat toward his left armpit.

“Look out!” Bruce cried sharply. “He’s after a gun.”

Raglan’s answer was to unbutton his coat and throw it back, showing
that there was no weapon there.

But Mr. Smith had betrayed no perturbation, even before he got this
reassurance. “Unless Raglan has changed his well-known methods,” he
said, “he doesn’t carry a gun. He has a strong aversion to the more
unpleasant forms of violence. He has compromised with necessity to the
length of a delicately wielded blackjack, and you’ll probably find that
his equipment includes a small bottle of chloroform. But it’s not on
record that he’s ever killed any one.”

Raglan made no comment upon these remarks. He was busy with the lining
of his sleeve, just beneath the armpit. He had, it appeared, a long
pocket in there. Presently he pulled out the necklace.

Here and now, I make my apologies for the banal philosophizings I had
addressed, at lunch time on the previous day, to its substitute. It was
worth all the labor it had cost. It was above price--a masterpiece.
The glory of it held the five of us spellbound, the connoisseur, the
disappointed thief, the lover who had tried to include it in his
bargain, the small boy and myself. We didn’t speak; we hardly breathed.
I think Raglan might have bolted had he not been bound by the same
enchantment as the rest of us.

At last old Mr. Smith broke the spell.

“Punch,” he said, “take this down-stairs and give it to your
grandmother. Tell her that none of her guests nor of her family had
anything to do with its disappearance. Nor her servants either. Ask her
if she’s willing that Belden should send up a good hearty breakfast to
an old acquaintance of mine whom I am entertaining in my room.”

Punch’s hands were shaking as Mr. Smith gently deposited the treasure
in the cup he made of them. I remembered the negligence with which the
imitation had been reconsigned to the boy’s old pocket handkerchief the
day before and wondered that I had not guessed the truth from that.

“I’m to tell Gran nothing but that?” Punch asked, his eyes dancing with
excitement. “And I’m not to tell any one else anything at all?”

“Not if you can help it,” said old Eagle-Eye with a grin. “We must keep
our bargain with Raglan if we can. Go on and find Belden, if your
grandmother gives you leave, and order the breakfast from him. Then
come back here.”

Punch darted off on his errand.

I think perhaps the return of the necklace to Mrs. Corbin served to
remind Bruce of his own injuries and disappointments. It was with a
very sulky expression that he watched the boy disappear down the stairs.

“I really can’t understand,” he said, turning impatiently back to
Mr. Smith, “why a professional criminal should be treated with such
extraordinary consideration. He ought to be in handcuffs now and on his
way to jail.”

“Surely you can understand keeping a bargain,” Mr. Smith answered
suavely. “I’ve heard you discourse feelingly on that subject within the
hour.”

Applebury’s only reply to that was an angry shrug of the shoulders. I
think he suspected the old gentleman of meaning to let the thief go
altogether now that the necklace was recovered.

I didn’t go as far as that, but I was a little uneasy lest his zest in
the new game he was playing--I hadn’t yet made out what it was--should
betray the old gentleman into trusting too far to Mr. Raglan’s dislike
of violence.

“My room and bath are entirely at your disposal now, Mr. Raglan,”
he said, leading the way toward his door and opening it. “As to the
change of linen I promised you, I’m afraid I’d been counting on Mr.
Applebury’s acquiescence in my bargain. My own perhaps can be made to
serve.”

Bruce’s face on hearing the suggestion that he provide the burglar
with a shirt and a suit of underclothes was a study in outraged
astonishment. But he was prevented from further expressing his feelings
by Raglan’s answer. Raglan, it appeared, was equally affronted by the
proposal.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said coldly. “I have a bag with me.
Perhaps the young man will bring it out. I’d be glad to fetch it myself
but I don’t suppose that would quite meet your ideas. It’s standing on
the first box around the corner.”

“Get it out, will you, Applebury?” said old Mr. Smith.

I really thought Bruce would burst. His neck distinctly swelled above
his collar. But he marched off in high dudgeon toward the trunk closet,
to return a moment later lugging a big black case of a nondescript
sort. It was rather battered, and would have passed muster all right as
the sort of thing a workman could carry tools in.

Bruce set it down without a word, and walked off to his own room. I
have never seen him, I remark with thankfulness, since.

Raglan picked up the bag and followed Mr. Smith into his room, I
swinging along after them on my crutches, feeling rather nervous over
Bruce’s defection. That little man might easily be too much, I thought,
for Mr. Smith and me.

Raglan would have carried the bag straight on through into the bathroom
if Mr. Smith hadn’t halted him.

“I think perhaps,” he said, “you’d better take off your clothes out
here. Then you can bathe and shave in privacy, and we can wait your
convenience.”

I saw the point to that, as Raglan did, and felt a little better. There
was a window in the bathroom, big enough for a man to climb out of, and
there might be a handy down-spout that would take him to the ground.
But no thief, no matter how desperate, would try to escape without his
clothes.

Raglan, stripped to his underwear, opened the bag, lifted out a tray of
tools, and selected his clean linen. Then he went into the bathroom and
locked the door behind him.

“I suppose,” I remarked, “he might have had that necklace hidden where
we’d have had the devil’s own time finding it.”

“No, I hardly think so,” Mr. Smith dissented politely. “No, that’s not
the reason I’m coddling him. He’s dirty and miserable, and ravenously
hungry, I suspect. When he’s clean and fed, he’ll be expansive. I want
him to tell me how he did it, and if they’ll only let us alone for half
an hour, I believe he will.--Ah, here’s Punch. Now we’ll know.”




CHAPTER XVIII

PEACOCK FEATHERS


As usual, Mr. Smith turned out to be right. You wouldn’t have known
Raglan for the same man when he came out of that bathroom, and
the transformation was completed when he had arrayed himself with
scrupulous care and deliberation in an exquisitely tailored light gray
suit with a fine blue stripe in it, symphonically harmonious with his
socks and his cravat, brushed his hair, and settled himself at the
little table where his breakfast was arrayed. I wondered as I watched
his delicate approach to the chilled grapefruit whether, had I seen him
first like this, I should have detected anything imitative or unreal
about his well-bred English accent.

Punch had been watching these proceedings with breathless interest.

“Are the pajamas in there?” he asked, indicating the tool box. “The
ones with the tear in the leg?”

Raglan nodded, indifferently enough, and then rather suddenly arrested
his spoon for a thoughtful look at the boy.

“Yes,” he said, presently, turning back to his breakfast, “they’re down
at the bottom, with the window shade hanger’s tools. Get them out, if
you’re interested. Keep them for a souvenir. I never want to see them
again.”

Punch had them out in a minute. There they were, sure enough. Lavender
silk pajamas, with a big nail tear in one of the legs.

“They’re really an important souvenir,” Mr. Smith observed. “They must
have been the main inspiration of the--campaign.”

“Naturally,” Raglan said. “There’s no trick about getting into any
house, nor about hiding in it. But how to stay hidden for as long as
may be necessary--well, the pajamas struck me as a pretty good answer.
I could lie up by day almost anywhere providing I had freedom to move
about at night. In a big house like this, full of guests who weren’t
likely to know one another any too well, I’d be sure to have it. No
one would pay any attention to a man in pajamas on his way to the
bathroom. I could get all I needed to drink. I could shave, I thought,
every night. I did shave, as a matter of fact, Wednesday night and
Thursday night. It looked easy--a little too easy, I fancy. It was
probably one of my mistakes. I’ve made several of them on this job, you
know.”

“We shall have to rely upon you to tell us what they were,” said Mr.
Smith politely. “The main conception was, it seems to me, quite in your
best vein. Indeed I blame myself for failing to recognize your--idiom,
so to speak, in the mere prima facie aspects of the case.”

The fellow was vain as a peacock, I could see. He was drinking down the
old man’s compliments like wine. I ventured to lend a hand.

“You weren’t very far from it,” I reminded Mr. Smith. “The thing had a
certain look to you which you kept reverting to, which made it hard for
you to believe it to be the work of an amateur.”

“I failed to think clear through to the edge,” the old gentleman
confessed mournfully. “I fell before the irresistible presumption which
imposed on every one else; the presumption that a man wandering about
the house at night in bath-slippers and pajamas must be one of the
guests. And that despite the clear clue we had to the contrary, in the
failure of Punch’s review of all the pajamas in the house that had been
slept in, to account for the pair with a nail tear in the leg.”

This time it was Raglan’s coffee cup that halted sharply on the way to
his lips.

“Punch!” he murmured, and turned another thoughtful look on the little
boy.

But he was too hungry to be diverted more than momentarily from his
breakfast, and Mr. Smith let him alone until he’d finished it. Then he
offered him a cigar, and said, “I’d like to begin at the beginning. You
came to the house ostensibly to put up window shades.”

“Ostensibly!” Raglan put in. “I worked here for two days; I must have
put up hundreds of them, all over the house--practically all over the
house. I couldn’t get into the old lady’s room. There was no work of
any sort being done there. But the rest of the house I came to know
like the palm of my hand.

“Wednesday afternoon when the old woman went around in her wheel chair,
attended by her grandson, assigning rooms to the people who were
coming, I was working up on this floor and I learned the names of every
one who was coming and where every one was to sleep, which helped a lot.

“And a little later that afternoon,” Mr. Smith observed, “when it
was time for the workmen to quit, instead of leaving the house you
moved into the room you’d selected for yourself and made yourself at
home.--You know, I wonder a little at your choice of a hiding-place,
the top floor of the house with only one flight of stairs leading to it
and only one door out of the place, once you’d got in.”

Raglan laughed--not a very nice sort of laugh, either.

“I thought of all that,” he said. “But there were compensating
advantages. I found them the first time I went in there. You can hear
everything that’s said in both sitting rooms, the old lady’s and her
daughter’s--by some trick of construction that I didn’t figure out.”

“I know about that,” Punch volunteered. “The light comes up too. I
asked grandmother why it was once, and she said grandfather had had the
tops left off the window casings so that the long windows would slide
all the way up.”

“I no longer wonder at your choice of it as a hiding-place,” Mr. Smith
remarked dryly.

He took the staggering revelation, though, a good deal more calmly
than I did. Heavens, how much did the man know! What was there that
he didn’t know! I began to understand the basis for the fellow’s
extraordinary complacency in confessing the details of his crime before
three witnesses. Mr. Smith did nothing to disturb it.

“When was it you stole the imitation necklace from Mrs. Corbin’s safe?”
he asked. “Wednesday night?”

Raglan shook his head. “I hadn’t a chance. I’d planned to, but the old
woman wouldn’t quiet down; kept ringing for her nurse, and quarreling
with her; wanted more dope than the nurse would give her, evidently. So
I had to wait. I got my chance the next day. Just the time the lad here
thought. I don’t know how he figured it out. The servants were all at
lunch, I knew, and the family out on the veranda waiting for the guests
to come. It was a close connection but I figured the safe wouldn’t
give me any trouble, and it didn’t. I didn’t waste any time about it
though.

“I got the necklace, dropped it in my pocket, shut the safe and came
out into the hall. Everything was all right and I had a clear out, down
the servants’ stairs. I had my case with me and anybody I might have
met would have thought I’d come back that morning to finish up.

“I stood there with my hand in my pocket, feeling of the necklace. I
hadn’t taken time to examine it. It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt that
it was all right. But it did now. The feel of it was just a shade off,
enough to make me suspicious.

“Just then I heard someone coming up the main stairs, so I went up
instead of down. Back to that damned box room. There I turned my torch
on the thing and saw at once that I’d been done. So I settled down to
think it out.

“The old lady had been done, too, some time or other. That was plain
enough. There was no doubt about her thinking this was the right
string. There wasn’t any doubt, either, when I thought it over, that
by taking the phony string I’d played straight into somebody’s hands.
Whoever had made the substitution had nothing more to worry about now.
I was the goat and I didn’t like it.

“Of course, if the real necklace had actually been stolen and disposed
of there was no help for it. But there was almost as good a chance that
it had been borrowed--pawned perhaps.

“That seemed more likely the more I thought about it. Whoever had
pawned it must have been sweating blood over what would happen when the
old woman gave the necklace to the girl. They’d have one good laugh
over the boob who’d stolen the imitation necklace, and think no more
about it.

“Well, then, why not put the phony string back in the old woman’s room?
It might not do anything more than take the laugh off me. But it might,
you see, do duty as a decoy for the real one. Besides, it would make
everybody think that some fool amateur had taken the thing, lost his
nerve and brought it back. Head off a lot of prying around.

“That night I started out in my pajamas, had a bath and shaved in the
nearest bathroom, went down-stairs and put the necklace back. I’d have
put it back in the safe, but the nurse was sleeping there that night,
so I didn’t chance it. I went back up-stairs feeling pretty good. And
then I got a devil of a jolt.”

Punch grinned. “When I came up-stairs after you,” he asked, “and turned
on the light in the billiard room?”

“My God!” murmured Raglan after a long stare at him.

“You see,” said Punch, “I saw the pajamas going across in the
moonlight. That’s how I knew about the tear in the leg. There are lots
of nails sticking out in the trunk closet. I might have thought of
that. But when you went up-stairs I couldn’t think why anybody should,
or rather, why anybody who slept up-stairs should have come down, so I
followed up to see. Well, I didn’t see anything or hear anything, so I
came back. I was sort of scared myself.”

The first look of bewilderment in Raglan’s face had deepened into one
of sour disgust. Mr. Smith set about restoring his complacency.

“Well, your plan worked,” he commented. “The imitation necklace served
to decoy the real one back just as you meant it to.

“If you remember,” he added, turning to me, “it was the curiously
imaginative quality of this stroke which gave the whole affair to my
mind the look--what you will perhaps allow me to call the style--we
were speaking of. I should have recognized his handiwork from that
alone.”

Raglan beamed again and took a dainty draught or two of his cigar.

“Oh, there was nothing to it really,” he said, with a falsely
deprecatory air that made me want to hit him. “It needed a bit of luck
to put it through, but I had it right enough, and I knew I had it too.

“I heard our young friend Applebury getting his instructions, the first
thing yesterday morning, to go to the bank and get the real necklace. I
knew it would be somewhere in this house before night.

“I didn’t know where it would be. It might turn out to be in any
one of four places. The girl might have it, or her mother, or her
grandmother--though I doubted if they’d trust it again to that Noah’s
Ark of a safe.

“But it struck me that the best chance of all was Applebury. He’d put
up his money for it, and he’d hang on to it if he could. So I decided
to try his room first.

“I made another of my mistakes then. I didn’t realize that there was
any one left alive in the world who’d be such a fool as to try to guard
a thing by sleeping with it under his pillow. I thought he’d either
hide it seriously, or else attach it somehow to his person; put it on
around his neck. That would have been the simplest thing.

“I chose the other alternative first, since it wouldn’t involve giving
him a tap on the head. I began a search of the room. I began with the
bureau, and found it wasn’t there. Then I heard some one coming, and
slid into the bay window, behind one of the curtains. There was an
amateur thief on the job it seemed, in pajamas just as I was.

“I watched him pretty close through a crack between the curtain and
the wall. It was possible, of course, that he’d get the thing. He was
a rank amateur all right. He hadn’t rummaged more than a second or two
over the bureau top before he hit something with his hand and moved it
with a rattle.

“Applebury waked up, and I never wanted to laugh more, when I couldn’t
afford to, than I did then. Because he slid his hand straight under his
pillow and showed me where the thing was. Then he said, ‘Who’s there?’
Another fool thing to do. It was his cousin, Grant, as I suppose you
know. Grant said he’d come in for cigarettes, took them, and went away.

“I stayed where I was of course, and waited for things to quiet down.
They didn’t for quite a while. Grant was ramming around in the next
room, trying to dress without making a light. I was afraid he’d waken
everybody on the floor. He didn’t, though, and at last I heard him go
down the stairs.

“But the house didn’t quiet down perfectly even then. Every little
while I’d hear a sound. Something was going on, and I couldn’t make
out what it was. Of course I stayed right where I was by the window. I
hadn’t stirred out of my tracks. I had stood there so long I felt as if
I’d grown to the rug. Applebury was sound asleep again. No need waiting
any longer for him.

“Then I happened to look out the window, and saw Grant and the girl
making a get-away. Well, that was made to order for me, or so it looked
anyhow. I might have known it looked too good to be true.

“It involved a change in my plan, of course. I had meant to shave and
go back to the box room and wait till the time of the wedding this
afternoon. I knew there’d be hundreds of people here, with a special
train coming down from town and all that. Then I’d put on these clothes
that I’m wearing now, come down-stairs, and be one of the guests. I
even thought of staying for the ceremony and picking up a ride back to
town.

“It was a pretty sort of idea, the sort that looks good when you think
of it, although on general principles the sooner you can get away after
you’ve got what you’ve come for, the better.

“Now, of course, there was no question about it. The girl had gone and
there wouldn’t be any wedding, and with the necklace gone, on top of
that, there would be one hell of a commotion.

“The thing for me to do was to get out. There’d be no question in
anybody’s mind but that the elopers had the necklace. Applebury would
think his cousin had come back and got it. If I ever saw anything that
looked like plain sailing, I saw it then.

“I got the necklace without any trouble, and went back to the box room
to dress in those filthy working clothes you found me in. These I’ve
got on are too damned light colored and conspicuous for a get-away of
that sort.

“Then I came back to the head of the stairs and stopped short. Somebody
was doing a regular sentry go in the hall below, back and forth, back
and forth. I thought he’d get tired of it pretty soon and I’d hear a
door shut somewhere and know the coast was clear. But I didn’t. I don’t
know who it was nor what he was doing it for, but he kept it up until
daylight. So I had to go back and hide again.”

He must have read something in our faces, for he turned once more to
Punch.

“Don’t tell me _that_ was you too!” he snapped.

Punch nodded. “I wasn’t waiting for you, though,” he said. “I didn’t
have my rifle or anything.”

“Oh, my God!” cried Raglan, with as deep a concentration of bitterness
as I’ve ever heard in human voice.

“Well, I know now,” he went on after a while, addressing Mr. Smith,
“what my real mistake was. And I swear to God I’ll never make it again.
I’ll never tackle another job where there are any damned boys on the
premises.”

“You know, that, I believe,” said Mr. Smith, “is a perfectly sound
idea.”

But Raglan was past being wooed back into a good humor.

“I’m sick of this damned country anyhow,” he declared. “The
profession’s being ruined by a lot of young hop-heads, hooligans,
stick-up boys who shoot first and try to think afterward and find
they haven’t brains enough. It’s no place for a gentleman, that’s the
trouble with this country. I’m going abroad again.”

“After you’ve served out your sentence for this affair, I suppose you
mean,” said Mr. Smith.

“Served out my sentence!” Raglan laughed. “I’ll go by the next boat.
You’re going to take me down-stairs now, aren’t you, and see me out
through the front door? And if you’re wise, you’ll send for a car to
take me back to town.”

“Punch,” said Mr. Smith, “go find your Uncle Alexander.”

Punch was gone in a flash.

Something else flashed too. Raglan saw it before I did and stiffened
in his chair. Old Mr. Smith, with a steady hand, was pointing his
automatic pistol straight at his head.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Raglan.

“I don’t intend to be,” said Mr. Smith.

“Then listen,” said the thief. “Do you think I’ve been in this house
four days without knowing what’s been going on in it? I know enough
queer things about this family to put it on the blink for the next
twenty years. I tell you what I’ll do unless you let me go, and let me
go damn quick. _I’ll confess._ Just ask the women, any one of them, how
they’ll like that. I know what I’m talking about.”

Any notion I may have had that I’d found in Raglan an example of that
romantic type endeared to the popular mind by scores of detective
stories, a gentleman who has taken to a life of crime, but remains
a gentleman none the less, had been dissipated during the past two
minutes. The fellow, for all his airs, was nothing but a shabby-minded
rascal. He had told us his story partly out of vanity, no doubt, but
in the pretty confident hope that we could be blackmailed into letting
him go free. I’ll confess to the pusillanimous notion that perhaps we’d
better.

I couldn’t tell what Mr. Smith thought. He said, with a perfectly
expressionless face, “You don’t know the Corbin family as well as you
think you do.” But, after all, this committed him to nothing, and he
was interrupted before he could go any further.

It was a thump rather than a knock that we heard at the door just then.
I guessed who it was, gathered up my crutches, and went and opened it.
There sat old Mrs. Corbin in her wheel chair, unattended. She must have
run herself up in the elevator.

“You’ve taxed my curiosity beyond what it would bear,” she announced
grimly. “I hope what you’ve got for me, in here, is worth my coming up
to look at.”

It was an immense relief to me that she had come, and even more that
she’d arrived on the scene ahead of her son. It was, after all, for her
to decide what was to be done with our disgusting captive.

She turned a long stare upon him, and evidently saw him, despite
his fine feathers, for exactly what he was, for, without a word of
enlightenment either from Mr. Smith or from me, she said, “So this is
the thief Punch has been thinking about for the whole of the past
week? I’m glad he’s been brought to light.”

“Raglan is well up to the top of his class as a gem thief,” Mr. Smith
now explained. “I’ve known him and his exploits for years. But since
Punch caught him and we took the necklace away from him he seems to
have turned his thoughts from burglary to blackmail.”

“Blackmail, eh?” the old woman echoed, with a sardonic grin. “Well,
you may tell him there’s nothing in it. It’s never worth while paying
money to a blackmailer, since no one with decency enough to stay bought
overnight will offer his silence for sale.”

“Exactly,” Mr. Smith agreed. “Raglan has been hidden,” he went on,
“most of the time since Wednesday, in the trunk closet on this floor.
It appears that this room has certain acoustical peculiarities....”

“Been eavesdropping, has he--on me and Victoria? Well, he’s welcome to
tell his story to any one he can get to listen. I don’t like to look at
him. Can’t he be tied up and put out of sight somewhere till he can be
taken to jail?”

Alec’s arrival just then answered the question. Punch, who came back
with him, had told him enough of the story to obviate the need of
further explanations.

Raglan was looking venomous by now. He was evidently under a heavy
temptation to free his mind. But Alexander Corbin had a way with him
which, to one constitutionally averse to violence, must have been
overpowering. He didn’t take the trouble to tie the rascal; merely
ordered him to stick his hands as deep as he could in his trousers
pockets and walked him off at the muzzle of his revolver.

“Have some of the men take him to the lock-up in the village,” Mrs.
Corbin told Alec, “and come back as soon as you’ve disposed of him.
You’ll find us in my sitting-room down-stairs.”

Punch was for following his uncle and the prisoner, but the old lady
called him back.

“I shall want you,” she said. Then she asked what time it was.

I wouldn’t have believed my watch, had not Mr. Smith’s majestic
time-piece confirmed the fact that it was only nine o’clock in the
morning. Heavens, what a day! It had begun for me when Judy whispered
my name through the window just before dawn, a bare five hours ago.
Already it seemed a week. And there were people in this house now,
plenty of them, just waking up and thinking lazily about breakfast;
people to whom it still figured as the wedding day of Judith Corbin and
Bruce Applebury!

I must have uttered some sort of consternated exclamation, for old Mrs.
Corbin nodded at me with a grim smile. “This is only the beginning of
it,” she said. “Go down and have breakfast, both of you, and then come
up at ten o’clock to my sitting-room. I’m an old woman--worse than
old--and I can’t put things off. I must settle them now, while I can.
Take me down to my room, Punch.”




CHAPTER XIX

THE AUTOCRAT


We made a rather silent meal, served imperturbably by Belden. I found
myself wondering whether that perfect butler’s manner would survive
the events which this volcanic day was likely to bring forth. Did he
foresee, or even allow himself to guess, what they might be? If I’d
been alone with him I would have sounded him out, since he and I are
friends of long standing, but in the presence of a comparative stranger
like Mr. Smith it wasn’t possible.

Just as we finished Victoria came in and the old gentleman, perceiving
that she wanted to talk to me, withdrew with his cigar for a stroll in
the veranda. She wasted no time after he had gone.

“You don’t owe me any favors,” she began candidly. “I haven’t been any
too decent to you, lately, but I believe you’ll help all the same.”

“I’m glad you believe that,” I told her. “I wish you wouldn’t think of
me as unfriendly. I’ll be glad to do all I can to help you as soon as I
know what it is that wants to be done.”

“There’s only one possible thing to do,” she asserted urgently. “There
can’t be two opinions about that; not two sane opinions. And if we’re
going to save anything at all out of the wreck we’ve got to do it at
once. But it can’t be done--nothing can be done--till my mother-in-law
can be persuaded to consent to it. You know she won’t listen to me--so
I’m putting it up to you.”

“I still don’t know what the thing is,” I told her. “If it aims in
any way at a reconciliation between Judy and Bruce Applebury, looking
toward their marriage....”

She interrupted me with a sharp laugh. “We’re long past that,” she
answered me. “They’re leaving, the whole crowd, on the eleven o’clock
train to town. Do you wonder?”

“Not a bit. They’ll have had enough of the Wild West, that crowd, to
last them another ten generations. Think of the myth that will grow up
among them, to terrify wayward little Appleburys with.”

Victoria smiled at that in spite of herself.

“Oh, if you want to joke about it....” she said petulantly.

“You don’t regret it, do you?” I asked. “You love Judy, and you know
her. You wouldn’t want her to marry a man like that!”

“Oh, I suppose not,” she admitted. “He shouldn’t have told her, when he
did, that he’d lent me money. And of course he shouldn’t have tried to
make us think that Bill had stolen the necklace.

“But what’s the good talking about that? Do you realize what’s supposed
to happen to-day? There are more than a thousand people who’ve been
invited to this wedding. There’s a special train coming down from town.
It’s to leave at two o’clock. And there’ll be hundreds coming from all
around the county in cars.

“There’s just one thing to do, unless we mean to have Belden meet them
at the gate and send them home. Judy’s grandmother’s got to be suddenly
ill. She could be easily enough. Everybody knows about her. With all
this excitement it’s likely to happen before night, anyhow.

“But if she’ll agree to it now, within the next half-hour or so,
we can call up all the afternoon papers in town and tell them the
wedding’s been postponed on account of it. We can cancel the special
train and have someone at the station to tell them about it. We can
telephone to a lot of people who’d be driving, and Belden can turn back
the rest. The real story will get around, of course, but that won’t
matter so much. Even the people here in the house will have to pretend
to believe what we tell them.”

“Have you outlined that plan to Mrs. Corbin?” I asked.

“That’s all it would need to make her turn it down,” she said hotly.
“Even if it had been her own idea, she’d jump to something else--heaven
only knows what. I want you to put it up to her.”

“Does Judy agree to it?”

I perceived that she evaded this question. “It was Judy’s own idea when
she wrote me that note, last night,” she pointed out. “I don’t see how
she could object to it now.”

I reflected that a good deal of water had gone under the bridge since
Judy had written that note. I told Victoria that the plan sounded
reasonable to me and that if nothing better turned up at the council
the old lady had called, for ten o’clock--it was nearly that now--I’d
advocate it.

She was bitterly disappointed at my answer, chose to regard it as a
refusal, but it was the best I could do.

“She ought to be given something that would put her to sleep for the
day. She’s drunk, that’s what she is--oh, with excitement, I mean.
There’s simply no telling what she’ll do.”

I agreed with the latter part of this statement. I wouldn’t put
anything beyond the old woman in her present mood, and I didn’t blame
Victoria for feeling jumpy.

“She’s shown herself pretty competent, so far this morning,” I pointed
out, for whatever consolation there might be in that. “If she can keep
it up she may leave our practical wisdom looking foolish.”

Victoria showed her opinion of this prophecy by getting up and leaving
me.

“Do you know where Judy is now?” I asked.

She paused to say, “No, I don’t.”

“How about Bill Grant?” I persisted. “Has anything been heard from
him?”

“He came back about an hour ago,” she said. “Perhaps Belden could find
him for you.”

I gave up further inquiry at that, mounted my crutches and joined Mr.
Smith. It still lacked a minute or two of our appointed hour with Mrs.
Corbin.

A car came coasting down the drive and I stared at it with a curiosity
that was admissible, I think, since it happened to be my own. I hadn’t
ordered it, certainly. My interest shot up to excitement when I saw who
was getting out of it.

“It’s young Mills, the parson from the village,” I told Mr. Smith in
answer to his inquiring glance. “I gave Bill Grant a card to him this
morning. Do you suppose _that’s_ what our old friend is up to?”

“I never entertained a doubt of it,” he said.

The three of us, Mr. Smith, the parson, and I, went up-stairs together
to the old lady’s sitting-room. Young Mills, though perfectly equal to
the situation, was obviously rather tense and his manner was highly
professional. We found, already gathered in the room, Bill Grant and
Judy, Alec, Victoria and Punch. Mrs. Corbin sat just as I had seen her
at our earlier meeting that morning. Miss Digby stood behind her chair.

No one was speaking when we came in, but I guessed from Victoria’s
flushed cheeks that, despairing of my aid, she’d tried to get a hearing
for her own plan and failed.

“These two young people,” Mrs. Corbin said, indicating Judy and Bill,
“tell me they’re fond of each other and want to be married. They’ve had
the grace to ask for my consent, and I’ve given it. So they’re going to
be married now. After they’re married, if there’s anything left to talk
about, we can talk.”

Victoria’s silence at this was as eloquent as the best of Cicero’s
orations against Catiline, but the old woman remained unmoved by it.

“Is there any one else, any one in the house,” she asked Judy, “whom
you’d like to invite to your wedding?”

“I’d like Belden,” the girl answered. And Punch was despatched to fetch
him.

We waited in silence until Punch came back with him. The old butler’s
face was by no means inexpressive, but the emotion most conspicuously
absent from it was surprise.

“Now, Mr. Mills,” said old Mrs. Corbin.

And so Judy was married to her lover, without the aid of a string
orchestra on the lawn or a light opera chorus of bridesmaids--not in
any respect as the event had been rehearsed the afternoon before. But
Judy seemed completely satisfied with it.

She turned, I was glad to see, from her husband’s embrace to her
mother, and Victoria, after a moment during which my heart had stood
still, gathered the girl up with a sob of surrender into her arms.
I don’t think there was a word said between them, but words weren’t
needed. The deplorably long strain was relaxed--temporarily, anyhow.

Judy turned away with her eyes full of tears.

“Where’s the guardian angel?” she asked, with a shaky laugh. “I can’t
see very well.”

Bill knew whom she wanted and pushed Punch into her arms.

“You don’t mind very much, do you, now?” she demanded. “It makes a
difference, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Punch, wriggling a little under the ordeal of being
publicly kissed. “I don’t mind as long as it’s Bill.”

“I don’t either,” she told him. “It’s surprising what a difference it
makes.”

And then she went the rounds and kissed the rest of us. When she
had finished us off she went back to her place. “There!” she said,
contentedly.

At that Victoria emerged; got her head, so to speak, above water again.

“It’s twenty minutes past ten,” she proclaimed, “and we haven’t decided
anything yet.”

Old Mrs. Corbin grinned at that. Apparently she regarded the event
of the last few minutes as highly decisive. But she was feeling too
good-humored to be captious just then.

“There’s the item of the necklace,” she remarked. “I suppose that may
as well be disposed of now as later. Let’s have it, Punch.”

Punch, for the last time it’s safe to say, took it out of his trousers
pocket and handed it to his grandmother.

“I gave this to Judy,” she said. “But she and her husband both take the
view that I bought it back when I wrote Mr. Bruce Applebury a check,
this morning, for twenty-five thousand dollars. Judy says she’d rather
have some less exciting sort of wedding present. Well, I’m willing to
fall in with her views.”

She dangled the glorious thing thoughtfully in her old fingers.

“Punch has been proved right about the old safe,” she went on. “That’s
evidently no place for it, especially as I’ve been known to forget to
lock it up. Anyhow it’s been mine for more than half a century, and
that’s long enough.”

With a sudden gesture of resolution she held it out to Victoria.

“Do you want it?” she asked. “Will you take it from me now? Call it a
peace offering, if you like.”

There was a pretty exciting moment after that. Victoria was so nearly
stupefied by the unexpectedness of her mother-in-law’s act that she
could at first neither speak nor come up to take the thing. My private
belief is that it was a knife edge whether the old woman wouldn’t
snatch it back. She hated giving it up, I’m sure. But she wouldn’t have
found much satisfaction in keeping it in the bank, and I think, too,
she was tired of the long quarrel.

The situation resolved itself at length. Victoria came out of her daze,
accepted the thing, and made all the proper acknowledgments. And at the
end of them, impulsively and a good deal more simply, she said, “I
hope we won’t quarrel any more.”

“Be reasonable,” said the old lady grimly. “Say, half as much.”

Victoria laughed and fastened the pearls around her neck. We all
crowded around her and admired them in a buzz of talk. It was silenced
presently by old Mrs. Corbin’s voice.

“If there’s nothing more to dispose of,” she said, “and I can’t see
that there is, I think I’ll excuse everybody but Miss Digby and take my
nap.”

“But--” Victoria cried aghast, “we haven’t settled _anything_ yet. It’s
half past ten and we haven’t even called up the papers, nor cancelled
the special train. We don’t even know yet what we’re going to tell
people.”

“What should we tell them? Why should we cancel the train? Let them
come and see for themselves.”

“Do you mean,” Victoria demanded aghast, “that we should let everybody
we know come down here for the wedding, and then turn them away at the
gate with the word that there isn’t going to be any?”

“No,” said the old woman. “Why turn them away? Bring them in. Feed
them, just as we’d meant to do. Introduce them to Mr. and Mrs. William
Grant here. Tell them they were married this morning. They’ll have to
know it some time and it might as well be now.”

“But,” Victoria cried, voiceless almost with horror, “what will they
think?”

“They’ll have to think what they please,” old Mrs. Corbin declared.
“After all, we’ve lived here a long while and we’ve always managed our
own concerns. We’re going to manage this.”

       *       *       *       *       *

And that, as of course you know if you remember our newspaper history
three months back, is what those Corbins did. There has been, so far as
I know, only one event productive of a similar sort of excitement, out
in these parts, in living memory.

But this reception at The Oaks was an indisputable victory for the
old woman who had willed it. For two hours she sat, very splendidly
dressed, in her wheel chair on the lawn like a sovereign on her
throne, Belden at her left hand announcing her guests as they came
up--superfluously in most instances since her memory for names and
faces, especially old names and faces, was astonishingly good. Some she
greeted ceremoniously, some with her familiar abruptness, some with an
offered hand and some without, but in every case her discrimination was
perfect. And in every case, I believe, she passed them on to her son
without a word of explanation. She was enjoying it, there can be no
doubt of that. Her amazing endurance can’t be accounted for otherwise.

Victoria was as good as she was, really superb. I pause to pay tribute
to the accuracy of Bill Grant’s estimate of her. She would yield,
he had predicted, to the proved inevitable. He’ll get on with his
mother-in-law, that young man.

Well, they got away with it, that’s what it all comes to. There wasn’t
a hint of apology discernible along the line.

The funny thing about it was that it turned out to be so easy. We saw
some startled faces, to be sure, and the name Applebury went off, as it
were, now and then by mistake. But in the main you wouldn’t have known,
unless you’d listened to private conversations more closely than one
does at a lawn party, that the earth was rocking, or that the stars
were about to fall. People chatted, admired the bride, congratulated
the groom, ate enthusiastically at the tables grouped around the
marquee on the lawn, danced on the canvas that had been stretched over
the tennis court--and took their leave.

There was nothing much else, when you come to think of it, that they
could have done.

The only unnatural thing about their behavior was the way they
departed. Once people had started to go there was a rather panicky sort
of rush--like the going-out of the tides of Fundy. It must have been
felt that it would be disastrous to be the last one there. By half past
six on that lovely June afternoon the lawns were deserted. Well, I
don’t believe any one was sorry.

Judy dropped down beside me upon a settee. She’d been looking lovely
all the afternoon, I thought, the simplicity of her going-away clothes
showing in agreeable contrast to the magnificence of the older women,
but now it was over she was white and limp, for the moment an orthodox
bride.

“Do you remember when this day began?” she asked. “I’m so tired I
can’t.”

“Don’t try,” I advised her. “It isn’t necessary. It’s all--come out in
the wash just as you said it would. There’s nothing more you even need
think about, let alone do.”

Victoria, still wearing the necklace, was strolling by with Bill.
Punch, very casually, followed along behind.

“I know what she’s saying to him,” Judy remarked. “She was talking
to me about it just now. She wants to know where we’re going--on
our wedding trip. She seems to think we’ve got to go somewhere now,
to-night--if only to a hotel in town. In order to be--decent, you know.”

“I’ll tell you where you can go if you don’t want to do that,” I said.
“Go down to my cottage. Just walk off, the two of you, now, any time
you like.”

“Oh, you darling!” she cried, and put her head down on my shoulder with
something like a sob of relief. “Do you mean we can stay there?”

“As long as you like,” I told her. “I got things ready, more or less,
on the chance, when I went home to lunch. I’ll get Mrs. Corbin to take
me in up here. You’ll find enough to eat to last you till Monday,
anyhow.”

“Your nice little house,” she murmured, “--that I thought I was going
to be married in. But this is better.”

She sprang up, all trace of fatigue gone.

“Bill,” she called.

Victoria followed them into the house.

Punch dropped down beside me.

“Well,” he said, “it’s been a perfectly wonderful three days, hasn’t
it? I don’t suppose I’ll ever have anything as exciting as that happen
again. But I’m sort of glad it’s over.--Only, where do you suppose
mother’s going to keep the necklace till she can put it in the bank on
Monday?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if she tells you I shall never forgive
her. You can trust her with it, anyhow. She won’t lose it.”

“No,” said Punch contentedly, “I guess she won’t.”


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.





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