Voices in the Night

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

And then had come the horrid recollection of a certain string of pearls which could not be claimed.

It had nearly killed him to deny the ownership of the casket; but he had denied it. There was literally nothing else to be done, with that spring-lock and the key in his possession.

So when the police took it away in order to find the rightful owner, he had gone into his room at the hotel--it was next the one to which Mrs. Chris had been taken--and shaken his fist at her through the wall, and sworn horribly not only at his own loss, but at the gain of others, which, with his experience in jewel-jobbing, he knew would follow.

And it did; for no sooner was the casket filed open by the police and its contents made known by a list, than owners began to crop up--crowds of them.

But it was when an assistant police-officer at the club, thinking to rouse him from his general despondency by putting him on the track of a good thing, mentioned that there had been a ruby in the casket which he really ought to get hold of; a ruby that had been claimed, on irrefragable evidence, as an heirloom by a peculiarly impecunious member of the Royal Family, from whom he could no doubt get it cheap without much trouble--it was then that Mr. Lucanaster had fled from his fellows, and actually wept to think that after three years' hard scheming he had bought that ruby at something like its real value.

That had been the worst blow; but there had been similar ones, and quite a large number of the pensioners invested in new cocks and quails and went about with cheerful countenances.

Another result was that Grace Arbuthnot, as she stood one day re-threading the four pearls which Sobrai Begum had brought to Miss Leezie's house on to the string that had been found in the casket, declared that it was just like the last chapter in a novel. Everything was clearing itself up--her face certainly warranted the remark--and rounding itself off neatly for the end. She thought, as she spoke, of the lost letter, the recovery of which, as Jerry's 'Secret Despatches,' had seemed so mysterious, until the child had told her quite simply that he had found the envelope in a bush in the garden--flung away most likely by the thief as valueless--and had kept it to play with, because some one 'must have hidden it, you know, an' didn't want people to wead it, so it was secwet.'

But she did not speak of this; she only said that she had never expected to see her pearls again, yet here they were, with only one a-missing--her dear old pearls! She held them up to her white throat and smiled, thinking of the many happy hours she had spent with their touch upon her.

If any one had told her that that was the first time they had touched a slender white throat, and that the last time a woman had worn them, they had been snatched from a slender brown one and flung in the dust from scorn of the hours they had brought to a bride, she would not have believed it.

Not her pearls! Whose else could they be? Had not even Mr. Lucanaster given his opinion on them as an expert? for even that agony had not been spared to the unfortunate man.