Then, turning to Dick and opening her reticule, she whispered rapidly:
“Say you sent it. What can it matter?” Dick, completely taken aback, clasped the bracelet on Maria-Teresa’s wrist without protest. He scarcely heard a word said by the Marquis, who was delighted to have solved the mystery.
“Well, young man, you can flatter yourself that you thoroughly mystified everybody.” And with that he hurried after Uncle Francis, who had been carried off to drink champagne by a group of admirers.
Dick and Maria-Teresa, left alone, exchanged looks. A moment later, they were brought to earth again by the advent of a horde of excited scientists.
“But what will your father say when he finds out who really sent the bracelet?”
“He will forgive you. I only made you tell the story to reassure him.... Between you and me, those old tales told by Aunt Agnes and Irene were worrying him a little.... He is rather a child in some ways.”
Carriages and motors were rapidly filling with people starting for the excavations outside the town, and then on by rail to Ancon, where Uncle Francis was to be shown the latest Inca discoveries. The Marquis and Mr. Montgomery passed them in one motor. Maria-Teresa waved to them, and walked on towards the town with Dick.
They were all to meet again that evening to dine and pass the night at the Marquis’ sea-side villa between Lima and Ancon. Uncle Francis would thus be able to begin his researches the very next morning, for Don Christobal’s villa, itself a treasure-house of antiques, stood in the very center of the excavations.
Meanwhile, the young people, less interested in things of death than the members of the Geographical and Archaeological Society, went to explore Lima. It was only after a long walk in the Pascos de Amancaes that they in their turn started by motor over an execrable road.
The approach of night could already be felt, and the great plain over which they were speeding was made even more desolate by the presence of the slow-flying gallinazos, or black vultures, overhead. These scavengers, half-starved in appearance, are the common adjuncts of scenery in Peru, tolerated and even respected, as they are, by a grateful municipality.