"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at least try to find the thief?"
He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.
"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you—you who had already troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."
"So you just let the money go?"
"So I just let it go."
She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with delight.
"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table, please."
He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet within, the electric bulb suspended over the table seemed to grow black and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly—or to slay, if a life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he could neither banish nor control.
"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.
"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously exultant.