"All nonsense," said Sartoris hoarsely. "You are
overstrung, and your imagination is too real for you. Did any of the rest of you hear a voice?"
The other two denied that they had heard anything. Beatrice broke out scornfully——
"It is a lie," she said. "You all heard it. Everybody heard it. If not, why are you all so white, and why do you all look so curiously at one another?"
It was quite true, and Sartoris had no reply for the moment. He seemed to be struggling to regain his lost self-possession. Then he glanced at the man called Reggie, who shrugged his shoulders. Sartoris was himself again by this time.
"It was certainly an effect of the imagination," he cried. "Let us talk of other things. My dear young lady, my friends here have been good enough to betray the fact that you have a lot of valuable diamonds in your pocket. Is that a fact?"
Beatrice scorned to lie, and now in any case it would have been useless. She looked from one to the other and wondered what had become of Berrington. Berrington was listening outside the door and feeling that the time for him to interfere was close at hand.
"It is exactly as these people say," Beatrice admitted.
"It is very good of them to take all this trouble," Sartoris said in a sulky voice. "Because of those stones in your pocket they are here to-night. They followed you here, because they are both lovers of that kind of thing. Out of purely disinterested motives, they had made up their minds not to tell me, but a little indiscretion on the part of my fair lady prevented that silent policy from becoming a success."
"What's all this about?" Cora asked uneasily.