Memories silenced her; and Jeff had to prompt her with a question: “But he hadn’t done that?”
“He hadn’t! He hadn’t!” she assented in a voice like a wail. “And when we tried to find Mr. Gardner he was gone. Gone off the yacht. Had run away. So then Mr. Viles went ashore himself, and by and by he came back, very well pleased, and said they had caught Mr. Gardner on the boat and had the necklace back again.”
“Did you run away right then?” he asked, when he saw she had forgotten to go on.
She hesitated, as though choosing her words.
“No,” she told him. “That was the day before. I was very unhappy even then. But until the next day I did not realize. Mr. Viles made me see. It was just before dinner, and I met him in the main cabin. He was very expansive and very good-humored and triumphant. He spoke of Mr. Gardner. And he said this to me.”
She repeated the words in a curious, parrot-like tone, as though they were engraved upon her memory. “He said: ‘It’s lucky you saw him, Lucia. If you hadn’t actually seen him come out of your cabin with the necklace in his hands we probably couldn’t send him to jail, even now!’”
Jeff was watching her attentively, waiting.
“I hadn’t really understood, before, that they would send him to jail,” the woman cried. “I asked Mr. Viles if he meant to do that, and begged him not to; and he just laughed at me. He said: ‘He’ll do ten years for this little piece of work, Lucia. And you’ll be the one whose testimony will send him up. That ought to be a satisfaction to you.’”
She added, with a movement of her hands as though everything were explained, “So I ran away. There was a sailor who helped me and gave me his coat, and I ran away, and got in your car because it was raining so hard and that was the first place I saw where I could hide and be sheltered from the rain.”
She broke off abruptly; and neither of them spoke for a period, while Jeff considered that which she had told him.