“Have you found—your papers?” she asked, looking directly at me for almost the first time.
“Not yet. We hope to.”
“The—police have not interfered with you?”
“They haven’t had any opportunity,” I equivocated. “You needn’t distress yourself about that, anyhow.”
“But I do. I wonder why you still believe in me? Nobody else does.”
“I wonder,” I repeated, “why I do!”
“If you produce Harry Sullivan,” she was saying, partly to herself, “and if you could connect him with Mr. Bronson, and get a full account of why he was on the train, and all that, it—it would help, wouldn’t it?”
I acknowledged that it would. Now that the whole truth was almost in my possession, I was stricken with the old cowardice. I did not want to know what she might tell me. The yellow line on the horizon, where the moon was coming up, was a broken bit of golden chain: my heel in the sand was again pressed on a woman’s yielding fingers: I pulled myself together with a jerk.
“In order that what you might tell me may help me, if it will,” I said constrainedly, “it would be necessary, perhaps, that you tell it to the police. Since they have found the end of the necklace—”
“The end of the necklace!” she repeated slowly. “What about the end of the necklace?”