"I had no diamonds and emeralds."
"You didn't! Where were you all the afternoon preceding the time you showed up at Eidstein's?"
This was his first intimation that he had been watched. He hesitated.
"Do I have to tell that?"
"Certainly. Why shouldn't you?"
A film, like tears, clouded his weak eyes. His voice was disagreeably beseeching.
"It would bring my mother into this," he objected, twining his fingers about each other and shuffling his feet.
"You'll have to tell us where you were and what you did," Braceway persisted.
"Oh, very well," he said desperately; "I was in a room in the Emerson Hotel with—with my mother. And I was—I was confessing to her that I'd stolen from the bank. She knew I needed money. I had told her I'd been speculating, and needed some extra money for margins. She gave me the rubies from her earrings; and she followed me to Baltimore. If I couldn't raise the money on the rubies, she was to borrow it on our house. She owns that."
He paused, on the verge of tears.