“‘This pendant was stolen!’ she cried, with sudden conviction. She looked at the stone again—she couldn’t resist it.
“‘You might call it the Robin’s Egg, when you have it re-cut,’ I told her.
“She gave a jump—that was what she was thinking of, the shrewd old wretch. She shoved the case down in her lean old breast.
“‘Then you will smuggle it in for me?’ I asked her.
“‘Yes, I’ll get it through, if I have to swallow it!’
“‘And you will keep it?’ I asked; and I laughed, I don’t know why.
“‘You remember my house?’ she cried, with a start.
“‘Like a book!’ I told her.
“‘But still I’ll keep it!’ she declared.
“It was a challenge, a silly challenge, but I felt at that moment that this was indeed a plunge back into the old ways of life. But, to go on. She didn’t seem to realize that keeping the Blue Pear was like trying to conceal a white elephant, or attempting to hide away a Sierra Nevada mountain. Then that cruel old avaricious, over-dressed, natural-born criminal had her turn at laughing, a little hysterically, I think. And, for a minute or two, I felt that all the world had gone mad, that we were only two gray gibbering ghosts talking in the enigmas of insanity, penned up in throbbing cages of white enamelled iron.