CHAPTER XVI
THE THIRTEENTH LETTER
Guy Trenholm raised his head. “May I keep this little paper in my safe?” he asked, taking it up. “I will return it at any time should you require it.”
Miriam snapped her locket shut and slipped it inside her gown.
“The paper is far safer with you than with me,” she replied, and sat quietly in her chair until Trenholm returned from placing it in a compartment of his safe. “It is incredible that Paul Abbott should have been the American soldier to whom Uncle Dmitri intrusted the diamond.”
“But not impossible,” retorted Trenholm. “And the law of chance brought you to his bedside just before his death. How was it you failed to recognize him?”
“I never really saw the American soldier’s face.” She sat back in a more comfortable position, conscious, for the first time, of complete fatigue. Recounting the tragic death of her Russian relatives and her own suffering, even to Trenholm’s sympathetic ears, was a severe strain. “We had no window in our hovel; only the faint light from a candle. I believe he wore a beard, but I was too ill to care, at the moment, what he looked like. My uncle trusted him and that was enough. Five years have passed since then.”
“I understand,” exclaimed Trenholm sympathetically, then with a tenaciousness which was part of the man, he added: “Was there nothing familiar about Paul’s appearance?”
She shook her head. “No. I have no doubt that illness had changed his appearance, Mr. Trenholm, to some extent. But with the Paltoff diamond far from my thoughts, and looking upon Mr. Abbott simply as a patient, if he had seemed even vaguely familiar I would have attributed it to the same feeling one has in passing a stranger in the street whom one might have met somewhere. You know the sensation.”
Trenholm nodded in agreement. “Have you made no effort to trace the Paltoff diamond?”
“I was desperately ill for months, Mr. Trenholm; and it was fully a year before I regained anything like my old strength. There was no one I could rely upon—no one in whom I had confidence. I tried, however, to interest one man, a lawyer,” her lips tightened, “that experience taught me a lesson I shall never forget.” She turned scarlet and for the first time dropped her eyes before Trenholm’s glance. She missed the sudden hot wrath which kindled in his eyes; a second later and he had himself in hand again.