I listened to him patiently, and in the end persuaded him to buy Watts an exquisite set of jeweled links. These had a fine diamond in each of them, but their greatest ornament was the superb enameling, worthy of Jean Toutin or Petitot, with which all the gold was covered. I asked one hundred and fifty pounds for these remarkable ornaments; and the old man, struck, like the artist he was, with the perfection of the workmanship, fixed his greedy eyes upon them, and was persuaded. He protested that they were too good, far too good, for such a worthless ingrate as his nephew, and that he ought to keep them in his own collection; but at last he ordered me to send them, with his card, to Lord Varnley's town house, and went away chafing at his own generosity, and, as he avowed, at his stupidity.
I saw no more of him for a week. The wedding had been celebrated, and Master Bertie Watts had conveyed away quietly to Folkestone as pretty an English girl as ever flourished in the glare of the West. Lord and Lady Varnley shut up their house during the week after the marriage, having sent the very numerous wedding presents to their bankers; and society would have forgotten the whole business if it had not paused to discuss the important question—How were the young couple to exist in the future on the paltry income of four or five hundred pounds a year? One half of the world may not know how the other half lives, but that is not for lack of effort on its part to find out. It was a matter of club-room news that old Lord Harningham had not relented—and, beyond what his nephew called "those twopenny-half-penny sleeve links," had not given him a penny. How then, said this same charitable world, will these silly children keep up their position in town when they return from the second-rate hotel they are now staying in at Folkestone?
Curiously enough, I was able myself to answer that question in three days' time—though at the moment I was as ignorant as any of them. The matter came about in this way. On the very morning that Lord Varnley went to Paris, it was known through the daily papers that there had been a robbery at his house in Cork Street, of a green velvet case, containing a crescent of pearls, turquoises, and diamonds. This was a present from one of the Embassies to his daughter, and must, said the reports, have been abstracted from the house during the press and the confusion of the reception. Later in the afternoon I received an advice from Scotland Yard cautioning me against the purchase of such a gem, and inviting immediate communication if it were offered to me. The theft of wedding presents is so common that I gave little heed to the matter; and was already immersed in other business when Lord Harningham was announced. He seemed rather fidgety in his manner, I thought, and hummed and hawed considerably before he would explain his mission.
"It's about those links I gave my nephew," he said at last. "They're far too good for him, Sutton—and they're too pretty. I never saw better work in my life, and must have been a fool when I let them go out of my possession—d'ye see?"
"Well, but you can't get them back now?" I remarked with a smile.
He took snuff vigorously at my reply, and then said,—
"Man, you're wrong, I've got them in my pocket."
I must have expressed my astonishment in my look, for he went on quickly,—
"Yes, here in the green case as you sold them. Do I surprise you, eh? Well, I'm going to give Master Bertie a bit of a check and to keep these things; but one of the stones is off color—I noticed it at the wedding—and I must have a new one in, d'ye see?"
"I thought that you had already handed them over," I interrupted, quite disregarding his last request.