"See here, Dicky boy, I'm in dead earnest," he interrupted eagerly. "Don't you remember my one fad—gems? Got enough tied up in them to build two apartment houses as big as this. Best amateur collection in New York, if I do say it. But I haven't anything like one of these rubies, and neither has any one else—no one else in this country, anyhow. There's nothing like them in all New York, from Tiffany's down to Maiden Lane, and never has been. I never saw anything like—near like any of them—except the one in the Russian crown of Anna Ivanovana. That's bigger, but it hasn't the same fire."
I just laughed at him. "Why, Billings, these pajamas were sent me by a friend in China, and I assure you—"
"Assure? What can you assure—what do you know about it?" said Billings rudely. "What did your friend know, or the one he had these things from—or the one before him—or the one still before that? Pshaw!" And he snapped his fingers.
With his hand he swept up the little caps and the long, wirelike threads that held them and sniffed the handful curiously.
"H'm! Funky sort of aromatic smell—balsam, cedar oil or something like that," he muttered half aloud. "That accounts for the preservation. But still—"
He crossed his legs and puffed thoughtfully.
"Tell you how I figure this out, Dicky," he said finally. "These nighties your friend has sent you are awfully rare and old; and for delicate, dainty elegance and that sort of thing they've got everything else in the silk way shoved off the clothes-line. But as to these jewels, you can just bet all you've got that whoever passed them on was not wise to them being under these covers."
Here he got to looking at one of the buttons and murmuring his admiration—regular trance, you know.
"By Jove!" I remarked, just to stir him up a bit. And he unloaded a great funnel of smoke and continued:
"My theory is that during some danger, some mandarins' war, likely, somebody got cold feet about these jewels and roped them in with these bits of silk—see how different they are from the rest of the stuff! Then, when the roughhouse came, these pajamas were swept along in the sacking—sort of spoils of pillage, you know. It was a clever method of concealment—clever because simple—a hiding place unlikely to be thought of because right under the eye. You recall Poe's story of The Purloined Letter?"