I had voiced the fear in both our hearts. We sat down opposite one another on either side of the table, with the newspaper full of diamonds between us. I don’t know whether I was as pale as Daisy, but I felt quite as bad as she looked. And sitting thus, each staring into the other’s scared face, we ran over the events of the evening.
We couldn’t make much of it; it was too uncanny. But from the first we both decided we’d felt something to be wrong. Why or how they’d come? who they were? what they wanted?—we couldn’t answer a single question. We were in a maze. The only thing that seemed certain was that they had one hundred and fifty diamonds of varying sizes that they had wanted, for some reason, to get rid of, and they’d got rid of them to us. And so we talked and talked till, by slow degrees, we got to the point where suddenly, with a simultaneous start, we looked at one another, and breathed out:
“The Castlecourt diamonds!”
We had read it all in the papers, and we had talked it over, and here we were with a pile of gems in a newspaper that might be the very stones.
“And next year I’d hoped to know Lady Castlecourt. I’d been sure I would!” Daisy wailed. “And now—”
“But you haven’t stolen the diamonds, dearest,” I said, soothingly. “You needn’t get in a fever about that.”
“But, good heavens, I might just as well! Do you suppose there’s any one in the world fool enough to believe the story of what happened here to-night? People say it’s hard to believe everything in the Bible! Why, Jonah and the whale is a simple every-day affair compared to it!”
It did look bad; the more we talked of it the worse it looked. We didn’t sleep all night, and when the dawn was coming through the blinds we were still talking, trying to decide what to do. At breakfast we sat like two graven images, not eating a thing, and all that day in the office I found it impossible to concentrate my mind, but sat thinking of what on earth we’d do with those darned diamonds.
I’d suggested, the first thing, to go and give them up at the nearest police station. But Daisy wouldn’t hear of that. She said that no one would believe a word of our story—it was too impossible. And when I came to think of it I must say I agreed with her. I saw myself telling that story in a court of justice, and I realized that a look of conscious guilt would be painted on my face the whole time. I’d have felt, whether it was true or not, that nobody really ought to believe it, and as an honest, self-respecting citizen I ought not to expect them to. Here we were, strangers that nobody knew a thing about, anyway! Daisy said they’d take us for accomplices; and when I said to her we’d be a pretty rank pair of accomplices to give up the swag without a struggle, she said they’d think we got scared, and decided to do what she calls “turn State’s evidence.”
She thought the best thing to do was to keep the stones till we could think up a more plausible story. We tried to do that, and the night after our meeting with Major and Mrs. Thatcher we stayed awake till three, thinking up “plausible stories.” We got a great collection of them, but it seemed impossible to get a good one without implicating somebody. I invented a corker, but it cast a dark suspicion on Daisy; and she had an even better one, but it would have undoubtedly resulted in the arrest of Perkins and the housemaid, and possibly myself.