Jessica smiled. It was one of the significant smiles referred to, more deadly than spoken words.
And so they parted, Jessica with a smile upon her lips, and hatred still in her heart, the other woman reveling in her good fortune at having had this assurance, as she chose to consider it, direct from a friend of Marietta Stringborg’s, that though Yootha had been acquitted she was guilty.
And Yootha?
Already she began to feel the draught in the mental atmosphere. Plenty of her friends remained true to her, of course, not giving a second thought to the suggestion that the pearls had been taken by her, but there were others....
Highly strung and extremely sensitive, she felt the difference in the “atmosphere” at every turn. The quick glances towards her and then away from her; the glances followed by whispers, and the whispers sometimes by smiles; the slight hauteur of folk who up till then had greeted her always with effusion; the sudden crossing from her side of the street to the other by acquaintances who noticed her approaching—these and similar incidents affected her intensely, causing acute pain.
“It is too dreadful,” she exclaimed one night on her return with her friend, Cora Hartsilver, to the latter’s house in Park Crescent after the Opera. “I have been miserable to-night—miserable. I felt during the whole performance as if all the audience was staring at me, saying one to another: ‘There she is, that is the girl so much talked about who was charged with the theft of the necklace at the Albert Hall ball.’ And it was not all imagination, dear, for I distinctly heard my name whispered twice by people a row or two behind us. And then, did you see Jessica? She saw me directly we entered the theater, and I saw her turn in her box and speak to her friends and at once they all gathered nearer to hear what she had to say—while we walked down to our seats they all stared at me as hard as they could.... I felt like a criminal, Cora. I feel like a criminal still....” and throwing her arms impetuously about her friend with her head on her shoulder she began to cry bitterly.
Cora consoled her as best she could, while in her own heart fury burned. It was fury at the thought, at the conviction she felt, that this injustice was not the outcome of misfortune, but that the whole thing had been deliberately planned, and that the person who had planned it had been none other than Jessica. And why did Jessica hate Yootha so? There could, she told herself be but one reason—it was because Yootha was her friend. Jessica would, no doubt, have liked to cast suspicion of the robbery on herself, but, unable to do that, she had stabbed her through her friend. And, so thinking, Cora ground her teeth. More determined than ever did she become at that moment to find out everything about Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, and if possible shame her in the eyes of the world forever.
“Don’t cry, my darling,” she said, as she gently stroked Yootha’s hair; Yootha’s arm still encircled her. “I have had a letter to-night from the house with the bronze face, and they are leaving no stone unturned to run the thief to ground. They ask me to call with you as soon as possible, as there are certain further questions they wish to put to you. Also, they say, they have something important to show you.”
“Let us go to-morrow morning,” Yootha exclaimed, looking up, and mopping her eyes. “And we might take Charlie with us; he will come if we ask him, I am sure.”
“I was about to suggest that,” Cora answered. “We will ring him up now. He said he would be back in town to-night, didn’t he? And it isn’t midnight yet.”