“Now, tell me everything, from the first!”
CHAPTER VIII
“It’s the Blue Pear,” she said, hesitatingly, wondering how to begin—“which, of course, means nothing to you.”
“And just what is it, please?”
“The Blue Pear, Jim, is a diamond. It’s a diamond that you and I, in some way or another, have got to get back!”
“To get back? Then when did we lose it?”
“I lost it. That’s what I’ve got to tell you.”
“Well, first tell me what it is,” he said, wondering at her seeming gaiety, not comprehending her nervous rebound from depression to exhilaration.
“It’s a very odd diamond, and a very big diamond, only tinted with a pale blue coloring the same as the Hope Diamond is tinged with yellow. That’s how it came to get its name. But the odd thing about it is that, when it was cut in Amsterdam, rather than grind away a fifteen-carat irregularity, it was left in a sort of pear-shape. Even before it was mounted by Lalique, it sold in Paris for well over six thousand pounds. Later, in Rio de Janeiro, it brought something like seven thousand pounds. There it was given to a French actress by a Spanish-American coffee-king. It was an African stone, in the first place.”
“But what’s all this geography for?” asked Durkin.