Madame nodded.
“After all,” she said, “he brought one of the Images home.”
“And a lot of good to us it is,” Sir Bertram remarked ruefully. “There is only one man who could help us, Angèle.”
“Ralph?”
He nodded silently.
“A most impossible person,” Madame sighed. “His feet are on the earth, his head in the clouds and his heart in China. I am afraid, as a matter of fact, that he utterly disapproved of Gregory’s enterprise.”
“Dog-in-the-mangerish, I call it,” Sir Bertram grumbled. “You can’t say that jewels collected by the priests of a temple, which have been hidden for practically a hundred years, belong now to any one in particular. I am afraid I still have sufficient of the Francis Drake outlook to claim that they belong to whoever has the courage and the wit to find them.”
“The buccaneering spirit,” she observed, with a faint smile of amusement. “You always had it, my dear Bertram. Nothing, I am sure, except the most rigid sense of honour, has kept you from robbing your friends.”
“I shall probably have to end my days doing that,” he sighed, “in some Continental Spa or other. Another year will see us through at Ballaston.”
She took his hand and held it.