“I wasn’t stealing the necklace—I was putting it back. The man who came to the castle with me, Spike Mullins, took it this afternoon and brought it to me.”
Spike Mullins! Molly remembered the name.
“He thinks I am a crook—a sort of Raffles. It was my fault. I was a fool. It all began that night in New York when we met at your house. I had been to the opening performance of a play called Love, the Cracksman—one of those burglar plays.”
“Jolly good show!” interpolated his lordship chattily. “It was at the Circle over here. I went twice.”
“A friend of mine, a man named Mifflin, had been playing the hero in it, and after the show, at the club, he started in talking about the art of burglary—he’d been studying it—and I said that anybody could burgle a house. And in another minute it somehow happened that I had made a bet that I would do it that night. Heaven knows whether I ever really meant to; but that same night this man Mullins broke into my flat, and I caught him. We got into conversation, and I worked off on him a lot of technical stuff I’d heard from this actor friend of mine, and he jumped to the conclusion that I was an expert. And then it suddenly occurred to me that it would be a good joke on Mifflin if I went out with Mullins and did break into a house. I wasn’t in the mood to think what a fool I was at the time. Well, anyway, we went out, and—well, that’s how it all happened. And then I met Spike in London, down and out, and brought him here.”
He looked at her anxiously. It did not need his lordship’s owlish expression of doubt to tell him how weak his story must sound. He had felt it even as he was telling it. He was bound to admit that if ever a story rang false in every sentence it was this one.
“Pitt, old man,” said his lordship, shaking his head, more in sorrow than in anger, “it won’t do, old top. What’s the point of putting up any old yarn like that? Don’t you see, what I mean is, it’s not as if we minded. Don’t I keep telling you we’re all pals here? I’ve often thought what a jolly good feller old Raffles was—regular sportsman. I don’t blame a chappie for doing the gentleman burglar touch. Seems to me it’s a dashed sporting——”
Molly turned on him suddenly, cutting short his views on the ethics of gentlemanly theft in a blaze of indignation.
“What do you mean?” she cried. “Do you think I don’t believe every word Jimmy has said?”
His lordship jumped.