“You look so kind, Mr. Chief, I don’t see how you can be so mean,” she coaxed him. “You really didn’t know you were capturing and torturing an innocent man, I feel sure. But you’ll right the wrong now, won’t you, for my sake if not for his? See what I’ve brought to assure you of his worth.”
The sergeant opened the bag, dumped its contents upon the desk before him and took up a piece of jewelry for examination.
“The emerald drop on that fillet is a princely ransom in itself,” Irene assured him. “But I brought my mother’s black pearls for good measure. Just look at them—the platinum settings alone are more than the thousand dollars’ worth that the nice-looking policeman said you required!”
Perhaps the sergeant found her pleading eyes and smile more inducing bail than the valuables offered. But he began a perfunctory examination of them. The while, the girl’s gaze encompassed the bent, black figure inside the rail. With an unsmothered exclamation, she started forward, then stopped short.
“Jane—not really?” she cried. “Did he send for you, too? And how did you happen—to come—in costume? I think when you were getting up this party you might have invited me. You know I dote on fancy-dress almost as much as police courts.”
Jane came slowly through the gate and straightened before her young relative.
“The ‘party’ was quite impromptu,” she said, pushing back her bonnet to show a smile more grave than gay. “It was I who sent for you, not Mr. Pape. Part of the bail is for me. You see, dear, I am arrested, too.”
“Arrested—you? I guess I don’t understand. How does it come that you are here when you’re visiting the Giffords in Southampton? And how in the world did you and Why-Not—You two were hauled up—together?”
Her final utterance was in a tone fictionally describable as “tinged by the bitterness of despair.”
As Jane seemed disinclined to explain, Pape tried to ease the moment. “We happened to meet near the Maine Monument. I was out for—for exercise, you see. Your cousin here showed me some new ways of getting the same.”