“What do you mean?” I gasped. “You don’t think—why, Flannigan—”
He merely grinned at me and thrust his hand down in his pocket. When he brought it up he had Bella’s bracelet on his palm, glittering in the faint light.
“Where did you get it?” Between relief and the absurdity of the thing, I was almost hysterical. But Flannigan did not give me the bracelet; instead, it struck me his tone was suddenly severe.
“Now look here, miss,” he said; “you’ve played your trick, and you’ve had your fun. The Lord knows it’s only folks like you would play April fool jokes with a fortune! If you’re the sinsible little woman you look to be, you’ll put that pearl collar on the coal in the basement tonight, and let me find it.”
“I haven’t got the pearl collar,” I protested. “I think you are crazy. Where did you get that bracelet?”
He edged away from me, as if he expected me to snatch it from him and run, but he was still trying in an elephantine way to treat the matter as a joke.
“I found it in a drawer in the pantry,” he said, “among the dirty linen. And if you’re as smart as I think you are, I’ll find the pearl collar there in the morning—and nothing said, miss.”
So there I was, suspected of being responsible for Anne’s pearl collar, as if I had not enough to worry me before. Of course I could have called them all together and told them, and made them explain to Flannigan what I had really meant by my delirious speech in the kitchen. But that would have meant telling the whole ridiculous story to Mr. Harbison, and having him think us all mad, and me a fool.
In all that overcrowded house there was only one place where I could be miserable with comfort. So I stayed on the roof, and cried a little and then became angry and walked up and down, and clenched my hands and babbled helplessly. The boats on the river were yellow, horizontal streaks through my tears, and an early searchlight sent its shaft like a tangible thing in the darkness, just over my head. Then, finally, I curled down in a corner with my arms on the parapet, and the lights became more and more prismatic and finally formed themselves into a circle that was Bella’s bracelet, and that kept whirling around and around on something flat and not over-clean, that was Flannigan’s palm.