Madame de Beaulieu and her chaperone occupied the bedrooms of one wing of the low rambling house. In the other wing Monmouth, Lindholm and Conway slept. Over this bachelor wing as it was called were some smaller rooms where the four maid servants slept.
The rooms of Madame de Beaulieu were beautifully furnished. It was a suite, with salon, bedroom and a large bathroom. Trent determined to allow himself an hour and a half. Skilled as he was in searching he felt he would discover something in those ninety minutes.
But the time had almost gone by and he was baffled. There was nothing. He probed and sounded and measured as he had seen Dangerfield’s detectives do but nothing rewarded him. What jewels Madame de Beaulieu owned she had probably worn. But how dare she wear at a dinner party where the Rosewarne’s might conceivably be, so well known a string of pearls? And what of those other baubles which were missing from St. Michael’s home?
A carved ivory jewel box on her dressing table revealed only a ball the size of a golf ball made of silver paper. She had begged him to save the tinsel in the boxes of cigarettes he smoked so that she might bind this mass until it became worthy of sending to the Red Cross.
Anthony Trent balanced the silver sphere in his hand. Naturally it was heavy. “If I,” he mused, “wanted to hide my three beauties I couldn’t think of anything safer than this. She’s clever, too. Why shouldn’t she use it for something she’s afraid of anybody seeing?”
A steel hat pin was to his hand. Exerting a deal of wrist strength he thrust it through the mass. In the middle it met with a resistance that the pin could not pierce. It was twelve o’clock as he put it in his pocket and locked the door of his own room. It seemed minutes before his eager fingers could strip off piece after piece of silver paper. And then the palm of his hand cupped one of the most beautiful diamonds he had ever seen.
It was fully a hundred carats in weight and its value he could hardly approximate. No stone of this size had ever been lost in the United States. He remembered however some four years ago the Nizam of Hyderabad—one of the greatest of Indian potentates and owner of an unparalleled collection of diamonds—had bought a famous stone in London. It was never delivered to him. The messenger had been found floating in the Thames off Greenhithe. The reputed price of purchase had been thirty-five thousand pounds. The Nizam’s had been a blue-white diamond and Anthony Trent believed he held it in his hand. He thought of his Benares lamp and chuckled. If he desired to avenge himself on Madame de Beaulieu for the loss of the Guestwick money he was amply rewarded now. The blazing thing in his hand would fetch at least two hundred thousand dollars if he dared dispose of it.
Obviously the correct procedure for the supposed Oscar Lindholm was to make his escape at once. He would have little chance to do so were the abstraction to become known. Of course Madame de Beaulieu would look in her ivory casket directly she came in. Did he himself not always glance anxiously at his lamp whenever he had been away from it for a few hours?
Cautiously he made his way down to the hall where his coat and hat were.
As he passed the door it opened and Madame de Beaulieu entered with Monmouth. She was pale, so pale indeed that Trent stopped to look at her.