"And while you're thinking," said George coldly, "I'll do the only practical thing there is to be done, and go down to the station and meet her, and have a talk with her and try to get her to be sensible."
"Perhaps that would be as well. But I still feel that my scheme would be the ideal one, if only we could find the girl. It is too bad that you have not a dark past."
"My dark past," said George bitterly, "is all ahead of me."
He turned and hurried down the drive. Hamilton Beamish, still meditating, made his way towards the house.
He had reached the lawn, when, as he stopped to light a cigarette to assist thought, he saw a sight that made him drop the match and draw back into the shelter of a tree.
Hamilton Beamish stopped, looked and listened. A girl had emerged from a clump of rhododendrons, and was stealing softly round the lawn towards the dining-room window.
Girlhood is the season of dreams. To Fanny Welch, musing over the position of affairs after Sigsbee H. Waddington had given her her final instructions, there had come a quaint, fantastic thought, creeping into her mind like a bee into a flower—the thought that if she got to the house an hour earlier than the time he had mentioned, it might be possible for her to steal the necklace and keep it for herself.
The flaw in the scheme, as originally outlined, had seemed to her all along to lie in the fact that Mr. Waddington was to preside over the enterprise and take the loot from her the moment she had got it. The revised plan appeared immeasurably more attractive, and she proceeded to put it into action.
Luck seemed to be with her. Nobody was about, the window was ajar, and there on the table lay that which she had now come to look on in the light of a present for a good girl. She crept out of her hiding-place, stole round the edge of the lawn, entered the room, and had just grasped the case in her hand, when it was borne sharply in upon her that luck was not with her so much as she had supposed. A heavy hand was placed upon her shoulder: and, twisting round, she perceived a majestic-looking man with a square chin and horn-rimmed spectacles.