“But who is their rightful owner?”
“Mrs. Gregson, sir.”
“What! How do you know?”
“It was all over the hotel an hour ago that Mrs. Gregson’s pearls had been abstracted. I was speaking to Mrs. Gregson’s maid shortly before you came in and she informed me that the manager of the hotel is now in Mrs. Gregson’s suite.”
“And having a devil of a time, what?”
“So I should be disposed to imagine, sir.”
The situation was beginning to unfold before me.
“I’ll go and give them back to her, eh? It’ll put me one up, what?”
“Precisely, sir. And, if I may make the suggestion, I think it might be judicious to stress the fact that they were stolen by——”
“Great Scott! By the dashed girl she was hounding me on to marry, by Jove!”