"Indeed?" Impatience with all this, as it seemed, determined effort to mystify him to no end, resulted in the pistol being flirted into the berth, and peremptory imprisonment of the woman's wrists. "Now!" Lanyard demanded—"come to your senses, Liane, be intelligible if you can. Why should I be in danger of arrest? What is this necklace you are raving about?"
"Give it to me first—"
"I know nothing of any necklace."
"You have forgotten; nevertheless, you have it. You told me you would never let it leave your person, you must have it hidden somewhere about you now. Find and give it to me before it is too late."
Her agitation was too truly rendered to seem put on for a purpose; and though he had not the least inkling of its cause, Lanyard reflected that in those seven months anything might have happened, the amplest reason might all too possibly exist for the distress of mind which Liane was so vividly portraying. Half-persuaded, he released her wrists and, stepping back, ran the hands of old cunning through his garments, locating every spot which in former days he had been accustomed to use as a temporary cache for purloined property—and drawing every one blank. Winding up with a shrug of fatigued incredulity: "There is nothing," he declared shortly. "Now be so kind—"
"Nothing!" Consternation rang in that guarded cry. "They must have it already, then, they must have searched you and found it while you slept! The doctor spoke of having given you a sleeping powder—enough, he said, to keep you quiet till morning."
"I didn't take it."
"They must have thought you had, or you wouldn't have been left unwatched, I would have found it impossible to see you. You have been asleep?" Lanyard nodded. "You have slept all afternoon, and soundly?" He confessed that he had. Liane subsided, crushed by despair, upon the cushioned transom beneath the port. "It was the same to them as if you had taken their drug—the opportunity they needed. Now they have found the necklace—you are lost!"
"But I have often been 'lost' in my life," Lanyard retorted, unmoved more than by impatience with this everlasting beating about the bush. "And at present I feel less lost than quite newly found, and so prefer to think myself—until, at least, you consent to become more coherent."
Beneath the sheer silk perfect shoulders stirred disconsolately. "There is nothing one can do now—one can only wait."