“I promise.”
“Thank you. I shall live for that moment. Now, give me the diamonds, and I’ll go. I don’t want you to be seen with me outside this room.”
I gave her the necklace, and she was at the door before I could open it.
CHAPTER VII
IVOR IS LATE FOR AN APPOINTMENT
I was glad to be alone, for as I had said, I wanted to think quietly.
Maxine had taken the diamonds, but she had slipped the necklace into the bosom of her dress, pressing it down through the rather low-cut opening at the throat, and had therefore left the leather case. I picked the thing up from the table where she had thrown it, and examined it carefully for the first time.
It had not been originally intended as a jewel-case, that was clear; and as Maxine’s voice had rung unmistakably true when she denied all previous knowledge of it to the police, I judged that the diamonds had not been in it when the Duchess entrusted them to du Laurier. He would almost certainly have described to Maxine the box or case which had been stolen from him, and if the thing pulled out from the sofa-hiding-place had recalled his description, she must have betrayed some emotion under the keen eyes of the Commissary of Police.
The case which, it seemed, I had brought to Paris, looked as if it might have been made to hold a peculiar kind of cigar, much longer than the ordinary sort. Within, on either side, was a partition, and there was a silver clasp on which the hallmark was English.
“English silver!” I said to myself, thoughtfully. The three men who had travelled in the carriage with me from London to Dover were all English. Of the trio, only the nervous little fellow who had reserved the compartment for himself had found the smallest possible opportunity to steal the treaty from me, and exchange for it this red leather case containing a diamond necklace worth twenty thousand pounds. If he possessed the skill and quick deftness of a conjurer or a marvellously clever professional pickpocket, as well as the incentive of a paid spy, he might conceivably have done the trick at the moment of alarm on the boat’s gangway, not afterwards; for when he had pressed near me in the Gare du Nord he had been on the wrong side. But for my life I could not guess the motive for such an exchange.
Supposing him a spy, employed to track and rob me of what I carried, why should he have made me a present of these rare and precious diamonds? Would the bribe for which he used his skill reach anything like the sum he could obtain by selling the stones? I was almost sure it would not; and therefore, having the diamonds, it would have been far more to his advantage to keep them than to stuff them into my pocket, simply to fill up the space where the case with the treaty had lain. There would not have been time yet for the real diamonds to have been copied in Amsterdam, therefore it would be useless to build up a theory that the stones given me might be false.