“Wait,” the Baroness commanded, “you shall hear everything. This morning I received a letter from Mrs. Adrien Beekman. You know who she is, of course. She thanked me, rather patronizingly, for giving my diamond necklace to her Ambulance Fund. She said she had sold it to a Mexican millionaire for fifty thousand dollars, enough to buy ten ambulances.”
“How did she get the necklace?” Trent asked seriously.
“That husband of mine,” she returned. “The Baron did it. I can only think that in his maudlin condition he remembered what I had told him at dinner about being bothered by the Beekman woman for a cause I’m not very much in sympathy with. There is no other explanation. It all fits in. Actually he took the diamonds to the Beekman place himself. I can’t do anything. I dare not tell the facts or I should be laughed out of New York.”
“Mrs. Adrien Beekman is very influential,” he reminded her, choking back his glee, “it may prove worth your while.”
“She hates me,” the Baroness said vindictively. “I’ve never been so upset in my life. You haven’t heard all. There’s worse. One of my servants is trying to get into the Army and Navy Finger-printing Bureau. She’s made finger-prints of every one in the house—me included—from glasses or anything we’ve touched. It was the Baron’s finger-prints on the jewel case, as the police found out, too, and I’ve got to pay her five thousand dollars reward!”
CHAPTER XVI
THE MOUNT AUBYN RUBY
IT was while Trent was shaving that the lamp fell. He started, blessed the man who invented safety razors, that he had not gashed himself, and went into his library to see what had happened.
Mrs. Kinney, his housekeeper, was volubly apologetic.
“I was only dusting it,” she explained, “when it came down. I think it’s no more than bent.”
It was a hanging lamp of Benares brasswork, not of much value, but Trent liked its quaint design and the brilliant flashing of the cut colored glass that embellished it. Four eyes of light looked out on the world when the lamp was lit. White, green, blue and red, eyes of the size of filbert nuts.