“Wait, dear heart, and you’ll understand. The coffee-king quarrelled with the Paris woman. This woman, though, smuggled the stone back to France with her. It was sold there, a few months later, for about one-fourth its market value. Still later it was bought for a little under six thousand pounds, by the late Earl of Warton, who gave it to his younger daughter, Lady Margaret Singford, when she married young Cicely—Sir Charles Cicely, who was wounded the first year of the war, you remember. Well, Sir Charles didn’t like the setting—it had been made into a marquise ring of some sort—so he took it to Rene Lalique’s work-shop in Paris, and had it mounted after his own ideas.”
“But who is Lalique?”
“A French l’art nouveau goldsmith—the Louis Tiffany of the Continent. But I’ve a lot to tell you, Jim, and only a little time to do it in, so we shall have to cut out these details. Lalique made a pendant out of the Blue Pear, hung on a thin gold stem, between little leaves of beaten gold, with diamond dew-drops on them. Well, four weeks ago the Blue Pear was stolen from Lady Margaret’s jewel case. No, Jim, thank you, not by me; but if you’ll wait, I’ll try to explain.
“I hardly know what made me do it—it was ennui, and being lonesome, I suppose. Perhaps it was the money,—a little. But, you see, when Albert, my innocently wayward young cousin, got mixed up with young Singford, I found out a thing or two about that less innocent gentleman. It started me thinking; and thinking, of course, started me acting.”
He nodded, as a sign that he was following her.
“I had detective-agency cards printed, and went straight to the Cicelys. Lady Margaret wouldn’t see me; she sent down word that the reward of three hundred pounds was still open, and that there was no new information. But I saw her at last—I shan’t explain just how. Before very long I found out something further, and rather remarkable—that Lady Margaret wanted to drop the case altogether, and was trying to blind Scotland Yard and the police. And that made me more determined.
“Before the end of the week, I found out that young Singford, Lady Margaret’s brother, had been mixed up in a row at Monaco, had made a mess of things, later, at Oxford, and had decided to try ranching in the Canadian North-West. I had already booked my passage on the Celtic, but the whole thing then meant too much for me, and, when I found young Singford was sailing that week on the Majestic, I succeeded in getting a berth on that steamer. Jim, as soon as I saw that wretched boy on deck, I knew that I had guessed right, or almost right. Oh, I know them, I know them! I suppose it’s because, in the last year or two, I have come in contact with so many of them. But there he was, as plain as day, a criminal with stage-fright, a beginner without enough nerve to face things out. I rather think he may have been a nice boy at one time. And I know just how easy it is, once you make the first little wrong turn, to keep on and on and on, until you daren’t turn back, even if you had the chance to.”
“And you took pity on him?” inquired Durkin, “or did you merely vivisect him at a distance?”
“Not altogether—but first I must tell you of the second dilemma. Before we sailed, and the first day out, I thought it best to keep to my cabin. You can understand why, of course. After all, this is such a little world, when you know the Central Office might be after you!”
“Or some old business friend?”