“And you tried to rob me not two hours ago!”
“Yes,” he said cheerfully: “I admit it. If I had got away with it then—well and good. You need never have known who it was. Unhappily for both of us, you fooled me.”
“For both of us?” she repeated blankly.
“Precisely. It puts you in a most serious position. That’s why I’m here—to save you.”
In spite of her fatigue, the girl rose to face him. “What do you mean?”
“Simply that between us we’ve gummed this business up neatly—hard and fast. You see—I hadn’t any use for that hat; I stopped in at an all-night telegraph station and left it to be delivered to Miss Landis, never dreaming what the consequences would be. Immediately thereafter, but too late, I learned—I’ve a way of finding out what’s going on, you know—that Miss Landis had already put the case in the hands of the police. It makes it very serious for you—the bandbox returned, the necklace still in your possession, your wild, incredible yarn about meaning to restore it ...”
In her overwrought and harassed condition, the sophistry illuded her; she was sensible only of the menace his words distilled. She saw herself tricked and trapped, meshed in a web of damning circumstance; everything was against her—appearances, the hands of all men, the cruel accident that had placed the necklace in her keeping, even her parentage. For she was the daughter of a notorious thief, a man whose name was an international byword. Who would believe her protestations of innocence—presuming that the police should find her before she could reach either Staff or Miss Landis?
“But,” she faltered, white to her lips, “I can take it to her now—instantly—”
Instinctively she clutched her handbag. The man’s eyes appreciated the movement. His face was shadowed for a thought by the flying cloud of a sardonic smile. And the girl saw and read that smile.
“Unless,” she stammered, retreating from him a pace or two—“unless you—”