"Why is she?" asked Lydia calmly. It seemed to her the cross-questioning was rightly on her side.
"Why, good God! because she isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence, and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll get nothing out of it. For the necklace being lost, she won't get that."
"Oh," said Lydia, the more coolly, as she noted she had nettled him on the human side until the legal one was fairly hidden, "but we don't think the necklace is lost."
"Who don't?" he asked, frowning.
"Madame Beattie and I."
"Where do you think it is then?"
"We think Esther's got it somewhere."
"But you say she lost it."
"I say she said she lost it," returned Lydia, feeling the delight of sounding more accurate every minute. "We don't think she did lose it. We think she lied."
Alston Choate remembered Esther as he had lately seen her, sitting in her harmonious surroundings, all fragility of body and sweetness of feeling, begging him to undertake the case that would deliver her from Jeffrey because she was afraid—afraid. And here was this horribly self-possessed little devil—he called her a little devil quite plainly in his mind—accusing that flower of gentleness and beauty of a vulgar crime.