"Well, doctor, are you satisfied?"
The woman who had sat in front of him and whose back alone he had seen while she chattered to the "doctor," was no other than Nina Noha.
Didier instinctively put on his dark glasses. She had come back to her seat. She had danced solely to please the redskin. At least he gathered as much from her talk which he could not but overhear. But the Captain was no longer listening to her voice. He was staring at her.
He was staring at the nape of her neck, the sight of which at one time distracted him. Even now he could not remove his eyes from it, but it was not the living flesh that held him, it was not the perfumed neck which he was wont to cover with kisses that he now gazed upon. His eyes were fixed on the necklace fastened round her neck.
Lord above, he had known a necklace with pearls like that! It was a long time ago . . . a very long time ago. It was more than fifteen years ago. Yes, he had held in his hand gems which were so like them that they might easily be mistaken for those which were round Nina's neck. He had held pearls in his hand like them on the day when the banker had passed to him, so that he might judge their brilliance, the necklace which once belonged to the Queen of Carynthia.
Oh, how he longed to count the number of pearls in it! That particular necklace—the fact had been repeated often enough during the trial for the Nut to remember it—contained sixty pearls. Such was the necklace which, if the Public Prosecutor was to be believed, Raoul de Saint Dalmas had stolen, and to obtain which he had not scrupled to murder his employer!
It was enough to strike any man to the very heart suddenly to see before his eyes, after fifteen years, a necklace like it . . . exactly like it . . . for after all, suppose it were one and the same?
"I am wandering in my mind," he thought, Nina Noha! A pearl necklace! Raynaud's murder! . . . All these things were whirling in Didier's poor brain.
"It's not surprising that I cannot see a necklace without thinking of the other one," he thought to himself. "But the other one contained a certain pearl, a pearl with a flaw in it, a pearl which had lost its luster. M. Raynaud pointed it out to me. True, I myself remember the particular pearl. It was not perfectly round either. True, I see it in my mind's eye still. . . . But here I cannot see it at all!
"Am I going mad? Haven't I yet done staring at that necklace, trying to count how many pearls there are in it? Why do I not at once cry aloud to the people in this theater: 'Cannot you recognize me? I am Raoul de Saint Dalmas. I was condemned to death for the murder of the owner of that necklace. I insist on this woman telling me where she got it from.'"