“Vanity. You and I—we were both born with great vanity in us. Mine has troubled me, tortured me, been a curse to me, all my life. It led me at last into a very horrible situation, in which the—that man who calls himself Nicolas Arabian was mixed up.”
“But you said you didn’t know him, that you had never known him!”
“That’s quite true. I have never spoken to him in my life. But it was he who led me to change my life. You must have heard of it. You must have heard how, ten years ago, I suddenly gave up everything and began to lead a life of retirement.”
“Yes.”
“But for that man I should probably never have done that. But for him I might have been going about London now with dyed hair, pretending to be ten or fifteen years younger than I really am.”
“But—if you never knew him? I can’t understand!”
“Did you ever hear that about ten years ago I lost a great quantity of jewels, that they were stolen out of a train at the Gare du Nord in Paris?”
A look of fear, almost of horror, came into Beryl Van Tuyn’s eyes. She got up from the sofa on which she was sitting.
“Adela!”
Already she knew what was coming, what Lady Sellingworth was going to tell her. She even knew the very words Lady Sellingworth was about to say, and when she heard them it was as if she herself had spoken them.