"Your assumption bears every mark of genius!" I assured him.
He turned back to the girl.
"Is that your necklace?" he curtly demanded.
The girl looked at me with clouded and troubled eyes. We all felt, in some foolish way, that the moment was a climactic one.
"No!" she answered, in little more than a whisper.
"You're positive?"
She nodded her head without speaking. The man turned to me.
"Yet you followed this man, assaulted him, and forcibly took that necklace away from him?"
"Hold on!" I cried, angered by that calmly pedagogic manner of his. "I want you to un—"
He stopped me with a sharp move of the hand.