"Explain yourself, please," his companion begged.
"During the last few weeks," Harvey Grimm proceeded, "I have broken up and cut into different shapes nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of diamonds. I have actually handled nearly eighty thousand pounds in money. You and I are fifteen thousand pounds each to the good. Our friends want to go on. Frankly, I've got the funks. I'd like to cry off for a time."
"That doesn't sound like you," Aaron remarked.
"Perhaps not," his friend admitted. "All the same, I've no fancy for thrusting my neck into the noose. Brodie doesn't even know it himself, but he was hot on the scent last time, He found out, somehow or other, the very house in which I was living. We were in the same room. He even had me searched. Once I saw him stare. I thought it was all up. Then his suspicion passed. It was just the way one of the Jewish girls down there had accepted me which put him off, but I tell you, Aaron, it was touch and go. Then the diamonds themselves—there was a stroke of genius there of which I am proud. I hadn't long to do it either. Where do you think I hid them?"
"No idea."
"Of course you haven't! Listen. I had set them roughly, in common brass fittings, like a pile of common brooches that were being sold, and I mixed them all up together, let them lie there on the counter of the little jeweller's shop where I have been doing my work and where I was hiding. Brodie took up some and let them fall through his fingers. I tell you that was the closest shave of my life!"
"I think we should be wise to drop it," Aaron declared earnestly. "We are off the rocks now, Harvey. I am content with what I've got."
"That's how I'm feeling," the other assented, "and yet there's this last necklace. It seems rather playing it low-down on Brinnen not to get rid of that for him. You see, unless it's broken up quickly, it's more dangerous stuff to handle than the others."
"Why?" Aaron demanded.
"Don't be foolish," Harvey Grimm admonished, a little impatiently. "There's the hotel where it was stolen, right in front of you. Here am I with the necklace, a hundred yards away. There's Brinnen on the same floor. There's Madame de Borria—why, it's a dare-devil piece of work, anyway."