"Naturally," said Choate. "I am their counsel, hers and her sister's."
"These aren't matters of law," said Madame Beattie. "They are very interesting personal questions, and I advise you to let them alone. You won't find any precedent for them in your books."
"I have been unpardonably slow in coming to you," said Alston. "And my coming now hasn't so very much to do with Lydia and Anne. I might have come just the same if you hadn't begun to annoy them."
"Well," said Madame Beattie impatiently. She wanted her nap, for she was due that evening at street corners in Mill End. "Get to the point, if you please."
"The point is," said Alston, "that some months ago when you began to make things unpleasant for a number of persons—"
"Nonsense!" said Madame Beattie briskly. "I haven't made things unpleasant. I've only waked this town out of its hundred years' sleep. You'd better be thankful to me, all of you. Trade is better, politics are most exciting, everything's different since I came."
"I sent at once to Paris," said Alston, with an impartial air of conveying information they were equally interested in, "for the history of the Beattie necklace. And I've got it. I've had it a week or more, waiting to be used." He looked her full in the face to see how she took it. He would have said she turned a shade more unhealthy, in a yellow way, but not a nerve in her seemed to blench.
"Well," said she, "have you come to tell me the history of the Beattie necklace?"
"Briefly," said Alston, "it was given the famous singer, as she states, by a certain Royal Personage. We are not concerned with his identity, his nationality even. But it was a historic necklace, and he'd no business to give it to her at all. There were some rather shady transactions before he could get his hands on it. And the Royal Family never ceased trying to get it back. The Royal Personage was a young man when he gave it to her, but by the time the family'd begun to exert pressure he wasn't so impetuous, and he, too, wanted it back. His marriage gave the right romantic reason, which he used. He actually asked the famous singer to return it to him, and at the same time she was approached by some sort of agent from the family who offered her a fat compensation."
"It was a matter of sentiment," said Madame Beattie loftily. "You've no right to say it was a question of money. It is extremely bad taste."