"Yes!" she whispered. "That girl—do you see what she is wearing—around her neck?"
He glanced down on to the stage in puzzled fashion. The girl in question, French and a new-comer, who was singing a little song of the boulevards with a good deal of appropriate action, wore no jewellery except a single rather curious yellow stone, suspended from her neck by a platinum chain.
"You mean that yellow thing?"
She looked at him in surprise.
"But of course you do not know!" she exclaimed. "That is the great yellow diamond. It belongs to——"
"To whom?" he interrupted eagerly.
"To Leopold's—to my brother's collection," she explained hesitatingly.
He was puzzled for a moment. Then the sense of her words, and their import, began to dawn upon him.
"You mean that the stone is amongst those that your brother has acquired?" he continued diffidently—"one of those he has not yet tried to have recut?"
"Yes!" she murmured.