THIEVES' WIT

An Everyday Detective Story

BY HULBERT FOOTNER

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1918,
By George H. Doran Company
Printed in the United States of America

THIEVES' WIT

1

My first case!—with what an agreeable thrill a professional man repeats the words to himself. With most men I believe it is as it was with me, not the case that he intrigues for and expects to get but something quite different, that drops out of Heaven unexpected and undeserved like most of the good things of life.

Every now and then in an expansive moment I tell the story of my case, or part of it, whereupon something like the following invariably succeeds:

"Why don't you write it down?"

"I never learned the trade of writing."

"But detective stories are so popular!"

"Yes, because the detective is a romantic figure, a hero, gifted with almost superhuman keenness and infallibility. Nobody ever accused me of being romantic. I am only an ordinary fellow who plugs away like any other business man. Every day I am up against it; I fall down; some crook turns a trick on me. What kind of a story would that make?"

"But that's what people want nowadays, the real thing, stories of the streets day by day."

Well, I have succumbed. Here goes for better or for worse.

Before beginning I should explain that though it was my first case I was no longer in the first bloom of youth. I was along in the thirties before I got my start and had lost a deal of hair from my cranium. This enabled me to pass for ten years older if I wished to, and still with the assistance of my friend Oscar Nilson the wig-maker I could make a presentable figure of youth and innocence.

During my earlier days I had been a clerk in a railway freight office, a poor slave with only my dreams to keep me going. My father had no sympathy with my aspirations to be a detective. He was a close-mouthed and a close-fisted man. But when he died, after having been kept on scanty rations for years, the old lady and I found ourselves quite comfortably off.

I promptly shook the dust of the freight office from my feet and set about carrying some of the dreams into effect. I rented a little office on Fortieth street (twenty dollars a month), furnished it discreetly, and had my name painted in neat characters on the frosted glass of the door: "B. Enderby"—no more. Lord! how proud I was of the outfit.

I bought a fire-proof document file for cases, and had some note-paper and cards printed in the same neat style:

B. ENDERBY
Confidential Investigator

You see I wished to avoid the sensational. I was not looking for any common divorce evidence business. Since I had enough to exist on, I was determined to wait for important, high-priced, kid-glove cases.

And I waited—more than a year in fact. But it was a delightful time! Fellows were always dropping in to smoke and chin. My little office became like our club. You see I had missed all this when I was a boy. Any youngster who has ever been speeded up in a big clerical office will understand how good it was. Meanwhile I studied crime in all its aspects.

I worked, too, at another ambition which I shared with a few million of my fellow-creatures, viz.: to write a successful play. I started a dozen and finished one. I thought it was a wonder of brilliancy then. I have learned better. In pursuance of this aim I had to attend the theatre a good deal, and from the top gallery I learned something about actors and actresses if not how to write a great play.

I mention the play-writing for it was that which brought me my first case. I used to haunt the office of a certain prominent play-broker who was always promising to read my play and never did. One afternoon in the up-stairs corridor of the building where she had her offices I came face to face with the famous Irma Hamerton.

Nowadays Irma is merely a tradition of loveliness and grace. Theatregoers of this date have nothing like her to rejoice their eyes. Then, to us humble fellows she stood for the rarest essence of life, the ideal, the unattainable—call it what you like. Tall, slender and dark, with a voice that played on your heartstrings, she was one of the fortunate ones of earth. She had always been a star, always an idol of the public. Not only did I and my gang never miss a show in which she appeared, but we would sit up half the night afterwards talking about her. None of us naturally had ever dreamed of seeing her face to face.

We met at a corner of the corridor, and almost collided. I forgot my manners entirely. My eyes almost popped out of my head. I wished to fix that moment in my life forever. Imagine my confusion when I saw that she was crying, that glorious creature!—actually the tears were running down her soft cheeks like any common woman's. Do you wonder that a kind of convulsion took place inside me?

Seeing me, she quickly turned her head, but it was too late, I had already seen them stealing like diamonds down her cheeks. I stared at her like a clown, and like a clown I blurted out without thinking:

"Oh, what's the matter?"

She didn't answer me, of course. She merely hurried faster down the hall, and turned the next corner.

When I realised what I had done I felt like butting my silly head through one of the glass partitions that lined the corridor. I called myself all the names in my vocabulary. I clean forgot my own errand in the building, and went back to my office muttering to myself in the streets like a lunatic.

I was glad no one dropped in. In my mind I went over the scene of the meeting a hundred times I suppose, and made up what I ought to have said and done, more ridiculous I expect than what had happened. What bothered me was that she would think I was just a common fresh guy. I couldn't rest under that. So I started to write her a note. I wrote half a dozen and tore them up. The one I sent ran like this:—I blush to think of it now—

MISS IRMA HAMERTON,

DEAR MADAM:

The undersigned met you in the corridor of the Manhattan Theatre Building this afternoon about three. You seemed to be in distress, and I was so surprised I forgot myself and addressed you. I beg that you will accept my apology for the seeming rudeness. I have seen you in all your plays, many of them several times over, and I have received so much pleasure from your acting, and I respect you so highly that it is very painful to me to think that I may have added to your distress by my rudeness. I assure you that it was only clumsiness, and not intentional rudeness.

Yours respectfully,
B. ENDERBY.

The instant after I had posted this letter I would have given half I possessed to get it back again. It suddenly occurred to me that it would only make matters worse. Either it would seem like an impertinent attempt to pry into her private affairs, or a bold move to follow up my original rudeness. A real gentleman would not have said anything about the tears, I told myself. My cheeks got hot, but it was too late to recall the letter. I was thoroughly miserable. I did not tell any of my friends what had happened.

That night I went alone to see her play. Lost in her part of course and hidden under her makeup she betrayed nothing. There was always a suggestion of sadness about her, even in comedy. When that lovely deep voice trembled, a corresponding shiver went up and down your spine.

I thought about her all the way home. My detective instinct was aroused. I tried to figure out what could be her trouble. There are only four kinds of really desperate trouble: ill-health, death, loss of money, and unrequited love. To look at her in the daylight without make-up was enough to dispose of the first. It was said that she had no close relatives, therefore she couldn't have lost any recently. As for money, surely with her earning capacity she had no need to trouble about that. Finally, how could it be an affair of the heart? Was there a man alive who would not have cast himself at her feet if she had turned a warm glance in his direction? Rich, successful and adored as she was, I had to give it up.

About five o'clock the next afternoon the surprise of my life was administered to me. I received a large, square, buff-coloured envelope with a brown border, and written upon with brown ink in immense, angular characters. On opening it my hand trembled with a delicious foreboding of what was inside, meanwhile better sense was telling me not to be a fool. It contained a card on which was written:

"Miss Irma Hamerton will be glad to see Mr. B. Enderby if it will be convenient for him to call at the Hotel Rotterdam at noon on Thursday."

For a moment I stared at it, dazed. Then I went up in the air. I did a sort of war-dance around the office. Finally I rushed out to the most fashionable outfitters to get a new suit before closing time. Thursday was the next day.

2

I had never been inside that exclusive of exclusive hotels, the Rotterdam. I confess that my knees were a little infirm as I went through the swing doors, and passed before the nonchalant, indifferent eyes of the handsome footmen in blue liveries. "Ahh, they're only overgrown bell-hops!" I told myself encouragingly, and fixed the Marquis behind the desk with a haughty stare.

Walking in a dream I presently found myself being shown into a corner room high up in the building. I was left there alone, and I had a chance to look around. I had never seen anything like it, except on the stage. It was decorated in what I think they call the Empire style, with walls of white panelled wood, picked out with gold, and pretty, curiously shaped furniture. Everywhere there were great bunches of pink roses, picked that morning, you could see, with petals still moist. It smelled like Heaven might.

That was all I had time to take in when the door opened, and she entered. She was wearing a pink lacy sort of thing that went with the roses. She didn't mind me, of course. She was merely polite and casual. But just the same I could see that she was deeply troubled about something. Trouble makes a woman's eyes big. Makes a beautiful woman twice as beautiful.

She went to the point as straight as a bullet.

"I suppose you are wondering why I sent for you?"

I confessed that I was.

"It was the heading on your letter paper. What do you mean by 'confidential investigator'—a detective?"

"Something a little better than an ordinary detective, I hope."

She switched to another track. "Why did you write to me?"

This took me by surprise. "There was no reason—except what the letter said," I stammered.

Several other questions followed, by which I saw she was trying to get a line on me. I offered her references. She accepted them inattentively.

"It doesn't matter so much what other people think of you," she said. "I have to make up my mind about you for myself. Tell me more about yourself."

"I'm not much of a hand at the brass instruments," I said. "Please ask me questions."

This seemed to please her. After some further inquiries she said simply: "I wrote to you because it seemed to me from your letter that you had a good heart. I need that perhaps more than detective skill. I live in a blaze of publicity. I am surrounded by flatterers. The pushing, thick-skinned sort of people force themselves close to me, and the kind that I like avoid me, I fear. I am not sure of whom I can trust. I am very sure that if I put my business in the hands of the regular people it would soon become a matter of common knowledge."

Her simplicity and sadness affected me deeply. I could do nothing but protest my honesty and my devotion.

"I am satisfied," she said at last. "Are you very busy at present?"

"Tolerably," I said with a busy air. It would never have done to let her think otherwise.

"I would like you to take my case," she said with an enchanting note of appeal, "but it would have to be on the condition that you attended to it yourself, solely. I would have to ask you to agree not to delegate any part of it to even the most trusted of your employees."

This was easy, since I didn't have any.

"You must, please, further agree not to take any steps without consulting me in advance, and you must not mind—perhaps I might call the whole thing off at any moment. But of course I would pay you."

I quickly agreed to the conditions.

"I have been robbed of a pearl necklace," she said with an air of infinite sadness.

I did not need to be told that there was more in this than the ordinary actress'-stolen-jewels case. Irma Hamerton didn't need that kind of advertising. She was morbidly anxious that there should be no advertising in this.

"It was a single strand of sixty-seven black pearls ranging in size from a currant down to a pea. They were perfectly matched, and each stone had a curious, bluish cast, which is, I believe, quite rare. As jewels go nowadays, it was not an exceptionally valuable necklace, worth about twenty-six thousand dollars. It represented my entire savings. I have a passion for pearls. These were exceptionally perfect and beautiful. They were the result of years of search and selection. Jewellers call them blue pearls. I will show you what they looked like."

She went into the adjoining room for a moment, returning with a string of dusky, gleaming pearls hanging from her hand. They were lovely things. My unaccustomed eyes could not distinguish the blue in them until she pointed it out. It was like the last gleam of light in the evening sky.

"The lost necklace was exactly like this," she said.

"Had you two?" I asked in surprise.

She smiled a little. "These are artificial."

I suppose I looked like the fool I felt.

"A very natural mistake," she said. "Some time ago my jeweler advised me not to wear the real pearls on the stage, so I had this made by Roberts. The resemblance was so perfect that I could scarcely tell the difference myself. It was only by wearing them that I could be sure."

"By wearing them?" I repeated.

"The warmth of my body caused the real pearls to gleam with a deeper lustre."

"Lucky pearls!" I thought.

"They almost seemed alive," she went on with a kind of passionate regret. "The artificial pearls show no change, of course. And they have to be renewed in a short time."

I asked for the circumstances of the robbery.

"It was at the theatre," she said. "It occurred on the night of February 14th."

"Six weeks ago!" I exclaimed in dismay. "The trail is cold!"

"I know," she said deprecatingly. "I do not expect a miracle."

I asked her to go on.

"I had an impulse to wear the genuine pearls that night. I got them out of the safe deposit vault in the afternoon. When I saw the real and the artificial together I was afraid of making a mistake, so I made a little scratch on the clasp of the real strand. I wear them in the first act. I have to leave them off in the second act, when I appear in a nurse's uniform, also in the third when I am supposed to be ill. In the fourth act I wear them again.

"On the night in question I wore the real pearls in the first act. I am sure of that, because they were glowing wonderfully when I took them off—as if there was a tiny fire in each stone. I put them in the pocket of the nurse's uniform and carried them on the stage with me during the second act. In the third act I was obliged to leave them in my dressing-room, because in this act I am shown in bed. But I thought they would be safe in the pocket of the dress I took off."

"The instant I returned to my dressing-room, I got them out and put them on, suspecting nothing wrong. It was not until after the final curtain that upon taking them off, I was struck by their dullness. I looked for my little mark on the clasp. It was not there. I found I had two strings of artificial pearls."

I asked her the obvious questions. "Did you have any special reason for wearing the genuine pearls that night?"

"None, except that I loved them. I loved to handle them. They were so alive! I was afraid they might lose their life if I never wore them."

Somehow, I was not fully satisfied with this answer. But for the present I let it go.

"Was any one with you when you got them out of the safety deposit box?" I asked.

"I was quite alone."

"Did any one know you were wearing them that night?"

"No one."

"Were there any strangers on the stage?"

"No. My manager at my request is very particular as to that. I have been so annoyed by well-meaning people. No one is admitted. In this production the working force behind is small. I can give you the name of every person who was on the stage that night."

"Has any one connected with the company left since then?"

"No."

"Who has the entrée to your dressing-room while you are on the stage?"

"Only my maid. But she is not expected to remain there every moment. Indeed, on the night in question I remember seeing her watching the scene from the first entrance."

"During which time your room was unlocked?"

"Very likely. But the door to it was immediately behind her."

"Have you any reason to suspect her?"

"None whatever. She's been with me four years. Still, I do not except her from your investigation."

"Does she know of your loss?"

"No one in the world knows of it but you and I."

"And the thief," I added.

She winced. I was unable to ascribe a reason for it.

"Do you care to tell me why you waited six weeks before deciding to look for the thief?" I asked as gently as possible.

"My jeweller—who is also an old friend, has secured three more blue pearls," she answered quickly. "He has asked me for the necklace, so that he can add them to it. I cannot put him off much longer without confessing that I have lost it."

"But shouldn't we tell him that it has been stolen?" I asked surprised.

She energetically shook her head.

"But jewellers have an organisation for the recovery of stolen jewels," I persisted. "The only way we can prevent the thief from realising on the pearls is by having the loss published throughout the trade."

"I can't consent to that," she said with painfully compressed lips. "I want you to make your investigation first."

"Do you mind telling me who is your jeweller?"

"Mr. Alfred Mount."

"If you could only tell me why he must not be told," I insinuated.

She still shook her head. "A woman's reason," she murmured, avoiding my glance.

"You know, of course, how you increase my difficulties by withholding part of your confidence."

There was a little tremble in her lovely throat. "Don't make me sorry I asked you to help me," she said.

I bowed.

"See what you can do in spite of it," she said wistfully.

3

I need not take the space to put down all the operations of my early reasoning on the case. I had plenty to think about. But every avenue my thoughts followed was blocked sooner or later by a blank wall. Never in my whole experience have I been asked to take up such a blind trail—and this was my first case, remember. Six weeks lost beyond recall! It was discouraging.

I narrowed myself down to two main theories:

(a) The pearls had been stolen by experienced specialists after long and careful plotting or,

(b) They had been picked up on impulse by a man or woman dazzled by their beauty. In this case the thief would most likely hoard them and gloat over them in secret.

Not the least puzzling factor in the case was my client herself. It was clear that she had been passionately attached to her pearls; she spoke of them always in almost a poetic strain. Yet there was a personal note of anguish in her grief which even the loss of her treasure was not sufficient to explain. She was a quiet woman. And strangest of all, she seemed to be more bent on finding out who had taken them, than on getting them back again. She had waited six weeks before acting at all, and now she hedged me around with so many conditions that the prospect of success was nil.

I had an intuition which warned me that if I wished to remain friends with her I had better be careful whom I accused of the crime. It was a puzzler whichever way you looked at it. However, an investigator must not allow himself to dwell on the hopelessness of his whole tangle, but must set to work on a thread at a time. Whichever way it turned out, I was to have the delight for a long time to come of seeing her frequently.

I was there again the next afternoon. This day I remember the room was fragrant with the scent of great bowls of violets. The lovely dark-haired mistress of the place looked queenly in a dress of purple and silver. As always when there were a number of people around she was composed in manner, one might say a little haughty.

There was quite a crowd. It included a middle-aged lady, a Mrs. Bleecker, a little over-dressed for her age and envious-looking. She, it transpired, was Miss Hamerton's companion or chaperon. The only other woman was a sister star, a handsome, blonde woman older than Miss Hamerton, very affectionate and catty. I have forgotten her name. The men were of various types. Among them I remember the editor of a prominent newspaper, a well-known playwright and Mr. Roland Quarles. The latter was Miss Hamerton's leading man. He looked quite as handsome and young off the stage as on, but seemed morose.

Miss Hamerton introduced me all around in her casual way, and left me to sink or swim by my own efforts. None of the people put themselves out to be agreeable to me. I could see that each was wondering jealously where I came in. However, since I had a right to be there, I didn't let it trouble me. This is life! I told myself, and kept my eyes and ears open. I was not long in discovering that these "brilliant" people chattered about as foolishly as the humblest I knew. Only my beautiful young lady was always dignified and wistful. She let others do the talking.

I stubbornly outstayed them all. The men very reluctantly left me in possession of the field. As for the lady companion I saw in her eye that she was determined to learn what I had come for. However, Miss Hamerton coolly disposed of her by asking her to entertain a newcomer in the next room while she talked business with me.

These people wearied her. She relaxed when they had gone. She said to me: "I had you shown right up because I want my friends to become accustomed to seeing you. I hope you did not mind."

I replied that I was delighted.

"I suppose I ought to account for you in some way," she went on, "or their curiosity will run riot. What would you suggest?"

"Oh, let them suppose that I am a playwright whose work you are interested in."

She accepted the idea. How delightful it was for me to share secrets with her!

My particular purpose in making this call was to urge her again to take the jeweller into her confidence. I pointed out to her that we could hope to do nothing unless we blocked the thief from disposing of the pearls. Very reluctantly she finally consented, stipulating, however, that the jeweller must be told that she had just discovered her loss. I explained to her that we must look back to make sure that the jewels had not already been offered for sale, but on this point she stood firm. She gave me a note of introduction to Mr. Alfred Mount.

I delivered it the following morning. At this time Mount's was the very last word in fashion. It was a smallish store but most richly fitted up, on one of the best corners of the avenue, up near the cathedral. Every one of the salesmen had the air of a younger son of the aristocracy. They dealt only in precious stones, none of your common stuff like gold or silver.

I was shown into a private office at the back, a gem of a private office, exquisite and simple. And in Mr. Alfred Mount I saw that I had a notable man. One guessed that he would have been a big man in any line. So far I knew him only as one of the city's leading jewellers. By degrees I learned that his interests were widespread.

He was a man of about fifty who looked younger, owing to his flashing dark eyes, and his lips, full and crimson as a youth's. In a general way he had a foreign look, though you couldn't exactly place him as a Frenchman, an Italian or a Spaniard. It was only, I suppose, that he wore his black hair and curly beard a little more luxuriantly than a good American. His manner was of the whole world.

My involuntary first impression was dead against the man. He was too much in character with the strange little orchid that decorated his buttonhole. Later I decided that this was only my Anglo-Saxon narrowness. True, he kept a guard on his bright eyes, and his red lips were firmly closed—but do we not all have to train our features? He was a jeweller who earned his bread by kow-towing to the rich. My own face was not an open book, yet I considered myself a fairly honest creature.

He read my letter of introduction which stated that I would explain my business to him. Upon his asking what that was I told him quietly that Miss Hamerton had been robbed of her pearls.

He started in his chair, and pierced me through and through with those brilliant black eyes.

"Give me the facts!" he snapped.

I did so.

"But you," he said impatiently, "I don't know you."

I offered him my card, and explained that Miss Hamerton had retained my services.

He was silent for a few moments, chewing his moustache. It was impossible to guess what was going on behind the mask of his features. Suddenly he started to cross-question me like a criminal lawyer. How long had I been in business? Was I accustomed to handling big cases? Had I any financial standing? What references could I give? And so on, and so on.

My patience finally gave way under it. "I beg your pardon," I said stiffly. "I recognise the right of only one person to examine me in this manner. That is my client."

He pulled himself together, and, I must say, apologised handsomely. Like all big men he was often surprisingly frank. "Forgive me," he said winningly. "You are quite right. I am terribly upset by your news. I forgot myself. I confess, too, I am hurt that Miss Hamerton should have acted in this matter without first consulting me. I am a very old friend."

I was glad she had done so, for something told me I never should have got the job from him. I did not tell him how she had come to engage me, though he gave me several openings to do so.

"I am not a narrow man," he said in his best manner. "I will not hold it against you. Only show me that you are the man for the job, and I will aid you with all my power."

I accepted the olive branch. "I spoke too hastily myself," I returned. "I shall be glad to tell you anything you want to know about myself."

We basked in the rays of mutual politeness for a while. Still that instinctive dislike of the man would not quite down. He asked no more personal questions.

"Have the police been notified?" he enquired.

"Miss Hamerton imposes absolute secrecy."

"Quite so," he said quickly. "That is wise."

I had my doubts of it, but I didn't air them.

"Have you any clues?" he asked.

"None as yet."

"What do you want me to do?"

"To publish the loss through the channels of the trade, with the request that if any attempt is made to dispose of the pearls we should instantly be notified. The owner's name, and the circumstances of the robbery must be kept secret."

"Very good," he said, making a memo on a pad. "I will attend to it at once, and discreetly. Is there anything else I can do?"

"I hoped that with your knowledge of jewels and the jewel market you could give me something to work on," I said.

"All I know is at your command," said he. He talked at length about jewels and jewel thieves, but it was all in generalities. There was nothing that I could get my teeth into. He gave it as his opinion that the pearls were already on their way abroad, perhaps to India.

"Then you think that the robbery was engineered by experts?"

He spread out his expressive hands. "How can I tell?"

We parted with mutual expressions of good will. I said, "I expect I shall have to come often to you for help."

"I expect you to," he said earnestly. "I want you to. Myself and my establishment are at your service. Let no question of expense hamper you."

I found later that he really meant this. I was, however, very reluctant to draw on him.

When I saw Miss Hamerton the next day I asked her a question or two concerning Mr. Alfred Mount with the object of finding out if he were really such an old friend as he made out.

"I have always known him," she said simply. "That I happen to buy things from him is merely incidental. He was a friend of my father's and he is a very good friend to me. He has proved it more than once."

I was tempted to ask: "Then why were you so reluctant to take him into your confidence?" But I reflected that since she had already refused to tell me, I had better keep my mouth shut, and find out otherwise.

"Mr. Mount asked if we had notified the police," I said, merely to see how she would take it.

I regretted it. Her expression of pain and terror went to my heart. She was no longer the remote and lovely goddess, but only a suffering woman.

"Oh, you did not, you have not?" she stammered.

"Certainly not," I said quickly. "I knew you didn't wish it."

She turned away to recover herself. What was I to make of it? One would almost have said that she was a party to the theft of her own jewels.

And yet only a few minutes later she burst out in a passionate plea to me to discover the thief.

"It tortures me!" she cried, "the suspense, the uncertainty! This atmosphere of doubt and suspicion is suffocating! I wish I never had had any pearls! I wish I were a farmer's daughter or a mill girl! Please, please settle it one way or the other. I shall never have a quiet sleep until I know!"

"Know what?" I asked quietly.

But she made believe not to have heard me.

4

I spent the next two or three days in quiet work here and there. The most considerable advance I made was in picking an acquaintance with McArdle, the property man of Miss Hamerton's company. Watching the stage door I discovered that the working-force behind the scenes frequented the back room of a saloon on Sixth avenue for lunch after the show. The rest was easy. By the third night McArdle and I were on quite a confidential footing.

From him I heard any amount of gossip. McArdle was of the garrulous, emotional type and very free with his opinions. The star was the only one he spared. From his talk I got the principal members of the company fixed in my mind. Beside Mr. Quarles there was George Casanova, the heavy man, a well-known actor but, according to McArdle, a loud-mouthed, empty braggart, and Richard Richards, the character heavy, a silly old fool, he said, devoured by vanity. Among the women the next in importance after the star was Miss Beulah Maddox, the heavy lady, who in the opinion of my amiable informant giggled and ogled like a sewing-machine girl, and she forty if she was a day.

Discreet questioning satisfied me that McArdle was quite unaware that a robbery had been committed in the theatre. If he didn't know it, certainly it was not known.

Out of bushels of gossip I sifted now and then a grain of valuable information. He informed me that Roland Quarles was in love with the star. For some reason that I could not fathom he was especially bitter against the young leading man. He would rail against him by the hour, but there seemed to be no solid basis for his dislike.

"Does she favour him?" I asked.

"Nah!" he said. "She's got too much sense. He's a four-flusher, a counter-jumper, a hall-room boy! Lord! the airs he gives himself you'd think he had a million a year! He's a tail-ender with her, and he knows it. He's sore."

"Who seems to be ahead of him?" I asked with strong curiosity.

"There's a dozen regulars," said McArdle. "Two Pittsburgh millionaires, a newspaper editor, a playwright and so on. But if you ask me, the jeweller is ahead in the running."

"The jeweller?" I said, pricking up my ears.

"Spanish looking gent with whiskers," said McArdle. "Keeps a swell joint on the avenue. Mount, his name is. He's a wise guy, does the old family friend act, see? He's a liberal feller. I hope he gets her."

This bit of information gave me food for thought. I thought it explained my intuitive dislike of Mount. The thought of that old fellow presuming to court the exquisite Irma made me hot under the collar.

I went to the store of Roberts, the manufacturer of artificial pearls. This place was as well-known in its way as Mount's, since Roberts had sued the Duke of Downshire and the public had learned that the pearls His Grace had presented to Miss Van Alstine on the occasion of their marriage were—phony. It also was a very fancy establishment but like its wares, on a much less expensive scale.

I fell in with a sociable and talkative young salesman, who at my request showed me a whole tray full of pearl necklaces. Among them I spotted another replica of Miss Hamerton's beautiful string.

"What's this?" I asked carelessly.

"Blue pearls," he rattled off. "Latest smart novelty. A hit. Mrs. Minturn Vesey had one sent up only yesterday. She wore it to the opera last night."

"There isn't such a thing really as a blue pearl, is there?" I asked idly.

"Certainly. These are copies of genuine stones like all our stock. Some time ago a customer sent in the real necklace to have it copied, like they all do. This was such a novelty Mr. Roberts had a pattern made and put them on sale. It's a winner!"

"I wouldn't want a thing everybody had bought," I said.

"I don't mean everybody," he said. "But just a few of the very smartest. It's too expensive for everybody. Seven hundred and fifty. The original is priceless."

"How many have you sold?"

"About ten."

"Who else bought them?"

He reeled off a string of fashionable names.

"That's only six."

"The others were sold over the counter."

The affable youngster was a little aggrieved when I left without buying.

Mr. Mount was both surprised and deeply chagrined when I told him that exact replicas of Miss Hamerton's pearls were to be had at Roberts' by anybody with the price. He didn't see how he could stop it either. It appeared there was a standing feud between Roberts and the fashionable jewellers, in which Roberts had somewhat the advantage because the regular trade was obliged to employ him. No one else could make such artificial pearls.

With Mr. Mount's assistance I had the sales of the replicas quietly traced. Nothing resulted from this. All but two of the sales were to persons above suspicion. These two had been sold over the counter, one to a man, one to a woman, and as the transactions were over two months old, I could not get a working description of the buyers.

On another occasion I went into Dunsany's, the largest and best-known jewelry store in America, if not in the world, and asked to see some one who could give me some information about pearls. I was steered up to a large, pale gentleman wearing glasses, very elegantly dressed, of course. I put on my most youthful and engaging manner. I heard him addressed as Mr. Freer.

"Look here," I said, "I expect you'll want to have me thrown out for bothering you, but I'm in a hole."

My smile disarmed him. "What can I do for you?" he asked impressively.

"I'm a fiction writer," I said. "I'm writing a story about blue pearls, and somebody told me there was no such thing. Was he right?"

"Sometimes the black pearl has a bluish light in it," said Mr. Freer. "But it would take an expert to distinguish it. Such pearls are called blue pearls in the trade."

"I suppose you haven't got one you could show me?" I said.

He shook his head. "They rarely come into the market. There is only one place in New York where they may be found."

"And that is?"

"Mount's. Mr. Alfred Mount has a hobby for collecting them. Naturally when a blue pearl appears it is generally offered first to him. You'd better go to see him. He knows more about blue pearls than any man in the world."

"One more question?" I said cajolingly, "in my story I have to imagine the existence of a necklace of sixty-seven blue pearls ranging in size from a currant down to a pea, all perfectly matched, perfect in form and lustre. If there was such a thing what would it be worth?"

When I described the necklace I received a mild shock, for the pale eyes of the man who was watching me suddenly contracted like a frightened animal's. The muscles of his large pale face never moved, but I saw the eyes bolt. He smiled stiffly.

"I couldn't say," he said. "Its value would be fabulous."

"But give me some idea," I said, "just for the sake of the story."

He moistened his lips. "Oh, say half a million," he said. "It would not be too much."

I swallowed my astonishment, and thanked him, and made my way out.

Here was more food for cogitation. Why should a few idle questions throw the pearl expert at Dunsany's into such visible agitation? I had to give it up. Perhaps it was a twinge of indigestion or a troublesome corn. Anyhow I lost sight of it in the greater discovery. Half a million for the necklace, and Miss Hamerton had told me that buying it pearl by pearl it had cost her little more than twenty-five thousand!

Meanwhile there was an idea going through my head that I had not quite nerve enough to open to my client. It must be remembered that though I was making strides, I was still green at my business. I was not nearly so sure of myself as my manner might have led you to suppose. To my great joy Miss Hamerton herself broached the subject.

One afternoon she said, apropos of nothing that had gone before: "I'm sorry now that I introduced you to my friends. Though I do not see how I could have seen you without their knowing it."

"Why sorry?" I asked.

She went on with charming diffidence—how was one to resist her when she pleaded with an humble air: "I have thought—if it would not tie you down too closely—that you might take a minor rôle in my company."

My heart leaped—but of course I was not going to betray my eagerness if I could help it.

"As to your friends having seen me," I said, "that doesn't make any difference. Disguise is part of my business."

"Then will you?" she eagerly asked.

I made believe to consider it doubtfully. "It would tie me down!" I said.

"Oh, I hope you can arrange it!" she said.

"Could it be managed without exciting comment in the company?"

"Easily. I have thought it all out. I have an assistant stage manager who plays a small part. By increasing his duties behind, I can in a perfectly natural way make it necessary to engage somebody to play his bit. I shall not appear in the matter."

"I have had no experience," I objected.

"I will coach you."

Could I resist that?

"It would be better to put in an operative."

"Oh, no! No one but you!"

"Well, I'll manage it somehow," I said.

She sighed with relief, and started that moment to coach me.

"You are a thug, a desperate character. You appear in only one scene, a cellar dimly lighted, so you will not be conspicuous from in front. You must practise speaking in a throaty, husky growl."

In order to prolong the delightful lessons I made out to be a little stupider than I was.

I was engaged the next day but one through a well-known theatrical agent where Miss Hamerton had instructed me to apply for a job. Just how she contrived it I can't say, but I know I came into the company without anybody suspecting that it was upon the star's recommendation. In the theatre, of course, she ignored me.

Two nights later I made my debut. Mine was such a very small part no one in the company paid any attention to me, but for me it was a big occasion, I can tell you. In the way of business I have faced death on several occasions with a quieter heart than I had upon first marching out into view of that thousand-headed creature across the footlights. With the usual egotism of the amateur I was sure they were all waiting to guy me. But they didn't. I spoke my half dozen lines without disaster. I felt as if the real me was sitting up in the flies watching his body act down below. Indeed, I could write several chapters upon my sensations that night, but as somebody else has said, that is another story.

What is more important is the discovery of my first piece of evidence.

At the end of the performance I was crossing the quiet stage on my way out of the theatre, when I saw a group of stage-hands and some of the minor members of the company by the stage-door with their heads together over a piece of paper. I joined the group, taking care not to bring myself forward. Another happened along, and he asked for me:

"What's the matter?"

Richards answered: "McArdle here found a piece of paper on the stage with funny writing on it. It's a mystery like."

"Let's have a squint at it," said the newcomer.

I looked over his shoulder. It was a single sheet of cheap note-paper of the style they call "dimity." It had evidently been torn from a pad. It seemed to be the last of several sheets of a letter, and it was written in a cryptogram which made my mouth water. I may say that I have a passion for this kind of a puzzle. I give it as I first saw it:

&FQZZDRR CV REW RIPN PFRBQ AT HXV
DGGZT EP FOBQ IVTCVMXK SJQ TZXD EA
TJTI ZK.

S CEDBBWYB SWOCNA VMD Y&F GC AVSNY
NCA &MW&M&L. HZF EDM HYW ZUM IKQ
BSCOAIIQVV ZXK FJOP WOD. KWX DWVXJ.
LEE FVTHV G&HJT LSZAND EBCC BFKY NCAFP
VEDFSF. BSQ ZWVXJ YXM II PL GC DCR FPBV
EA&BO ULS RLZQ WB NELJ KZNEDLKDUAA.
CSQVE VDEV-FBACP! S'WX OS QQTB EHHZXV.

J.

I had no proof on beholding this meaningless assortment of letters that it had anything to do with my case, but I had a hunch. The question was how to get possession of it without showing my hand. I kept silent for a while, and let the discussion rage as to the proper way to translate it.

My excitable friend McArdle (who did not know me, of course, in my present character), naturally as the finder of the paper took a leading part in the discussion. The principals of the company had not yet emerged from their dressing-rooms. My opportunity came when McArdle stated in his positive way that it was a code, and that it was not possible to translate it without having the code-book.

"A code is generally regular words," I suggested mildly, as became the newest and humblest member of the company. "Nobody would ever think up these crazy combinations of letters. I should say it was a cryptogram."

McArdle wouldn't acknowledge that he didn't know what a cryptogram was, but somebody else asked.

"Substituting one letter for another according to a numerical key," I said. "Easy enough to translate it if you can hit on the key."

One thing led to another and soon came the inevitable challenge.

"Bet you a dollar you can't read it!" cried McArdle.

I hung back until the whole crowd joined him in taunting me.

"Put up or shut up!" cried McArdle.

The upshot was that we each deposited a dollar with old Tom the door-keeper, and I took the paper home.

It was the most ingenious and difficult cryptogram I ever tackled. The sun was up before I got it. It was a richer prize than I had hoped for. Here it is:

"disposed of and your share of the money is here whenever you want to get it.

I strongly advise you not to leave the company. You say she has not discovered her loss. All right. But these phony pearls soon lose their lustre. She might get on to it the same night you hand in your resignation. Then good-night. I'll be back Monday. J."*

* For the benefit of those of curious minds I will give the key to the cryptogram. The simplest form of this kind of puzzle is that in which every letter has a certain other letter to stand for it. It may be the one before it, the one after it, or a purely arbitrary substitution. In any case the same letter always has the same alias. That is child's play to solve. I soon discovered that I was faced by something more complex. Observe that in one place "night" appears as EA&BO, whereas in the next line it is FBACP. "Company" masqueraded in this extraordinary form: &MW&M&L. Here was a jawbreaker! To make a long story short I discovered after hundreds of experiments that the first letter of the first word of each sentence was ten letters in advance of the one set down; the second letter eleven letters ahead, and so on up to twenty-five, then begin over from ten. With each sentence however short the writer began afresh from ten. He added to the complications by including the character & as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. The fragmentary sentence at the top of the page held me up for a long time until I discovered that the first letter was twenty-three numbers in advance of the right one. Several mistakes on the part of the writer added to my difficulties.

5

In my experience I have found in adopting a disguise that it is no less important to change the character than the personal appearance. As the new member of Miss Hamerton's company I called myself William Faxon. I appeared as a shabby, genteel little fellow with lanky hair and glasses. The glasses were removed only when I went on the stage in the dark scene. On top of my bald spot I wore a kind of transformation that my friend Oscar Nilson furnished. It combed into my own hair, was sprinkled with grey and made me look like a man on the shady side of forty somewhat in need of a barber. The character I assumed was that of a gentle, friendly little party who agreed with everybody. The people of the company mostly despised me and made me a receptacle for their egotistical outpourings. They little guessed how they bored me.

When I joined the company it had been agreed between Miss Hamerton and I that thereafter she had better come to the office to hear my reports. It was her custom to call nearly every afternoon about five. She insisted on hearing every detail of my activities, and listened to the story from day to day with the same anxious interest.

Since she had first broken out in my presence she seemed not to mind to show her feelings to me. Indeed I guessed that it was a kind of relief to the high-strung woman who was always in the limelight, to let herself go a little. Her implied confidence was very gratifying to me. She never gave me the key to her anxiety in so many words, but by this time I was beginning to guess the explanation, as I suppose you are, too.

When I had deciphered the cryptogram I went to bed in high satisfaction. I knew then that I was on the right track. The man (or woman) I was after was in Miss Hamerton's company. I slept until afternoon. Miss Hamerton had expected not to come that day so I called her up to say I had news. She said she couldn't come, but the coast was clear, and could I come to her?

I found her pale and distrait. "Not bad news?" she asked apprehensively. "I'm not equal to it!"

"But how do I know what is bad and good to you?" I objected.

She ignored the complaint.

When I explained the circumstances of the finding of the cryptogram, and showed her my translation I received another surprise. A sigh escaped her; an expression of beatific relief and gladness came into her face. The roses returned to her cheeks. She jumped up.

"You're a welcome messenger!" she cried. "Oh, I'm happy now! I won't worry any more! I know!"

I suppose I looked blank. She laughed at me. "Don't mind me!" she begged. "You're on the right track! You'll soon know everything!"

She moved around the room humming to herself like a happy girl. She buried her face in a bowl of roses and caressed them tenderly. "If I knew who had sent them," I thought, "perhaps it would give me a clue." But what had the cryptogram to do with it?

Suddenly to my surprise she said: "Stay and have dinner with me here, Mr. Enderby. I was going to a party, but I will send regrets. I don't want to be with any of them! I'm so happy! I would either have to hide it, or explain it. I want to be myself for a while."

I did not require much persuasion. It was like dining in Fairyland! By tacit consent we avoided any reference to the case. I shall never forget that hour as long as I live. We were alone, for the unpleasant Mrs. Bleecker thinking that Miss Hamerton was dining out, had gone off to some friends of hers.

Afterwards I went home to disguise myself, and then proceeded to the theatre. I had already photographed the cryptogram, and put the negative in my safe. McArdle was lying in wait for me, and I allowed him to drag it out of me, that I had not been able to translate it. He collected the stakes in high glee.

The paper was passed from hand to hand until it literally fell to pieces. No one could make anything of it of course. I encouraged the talk and helped circulate the paper, and watched from behind my innocent pieces of window-glass for some one to betray himself. But I saw nothing. The conviction was forced on me that I had a mighty clever one to deal with.

During my long waits I loitered from dressing-room to dressing-room, and let them talk. As opportunities presented themselves I quietly searched for the first page of that letter, though I supposed it had been destroyed.

Eighteen actors and actresses and a working force of six comprised the field of my explorations. However, the fact that punctuation played a part in the cryptogram, not to speak of the choice of words, convinced me that both the writer and reader of it must be persons of a certain education, so I eliminated the illiterates. This reduced me at one stroke to five men and four women. Of these two of the men were obviously too silly and vain to have carried out such a nervy piece of work, while one of the women was a dear old lady who had been on the stage for half a century, and another was a bit of dandelion fluff. These exclusions left me with five, to wit: Roland Quarles, George Casanova, Kenton Milbourne, Beulah Maddox and Mary Gray.

Roland Quarles I have already mentioned. Both he and Casanova were actors of established reputations who had been in receipt of handsome salaries for some seasons. I scarcely considered them. Milbourne was my dark horse. He was a hatchet-faced individual, homely, uninteresting, unhealthy-looking. His fancy name sat on him strangely. He looked like a John Doe or a Joe Williams. Miss Maddox was a large woman of the gushing-hysterical type; Miss Gray a quiet well-bred girl who kept to herself.

While I concentrated on those named, I did not, however, overlook the doings of the others. With all the men I was soon on excellent terms but the women baffled me. Women naturally despise a man of the kind I made out to be. You can't win a woman's confidence without making love to her, and that was out of my line.

On Thursday night of the week after I joined, Miss Beauchamp, who played a maid's part, spoiled a scene of Miss Hamerton's by missing her cue. It was not the first offense, and she was fired on the spot. This girl was the bit of fluff I have mentioned. The occasion suggested an opportunity to me. There was no time to be lost so I went to Miss Hamerton at once. In my humble, shabby character I meekly bespoke the part for a "friend." Miss Hamerton was startled. She said she would consider it.

I had no sooner got home that night than she called me up to ask what I had meant. I did not want to argue with her over the telephone, so I asked her to see me next morning. She said she would come to my office as soon as she had breakfasted.

Using all my powers of persuasion it took me more than an hour to win her consent to my putting a woman operative in the vacant part. Not only did I have to have a woman in the company, I told her, but I needed an assistant outside. Not by working twenty-four hours a day could I track down all the clues that opened up. She would never have given in, I believe, had it not been for the mysterious comfort she had found in the cryptogram.

The rehearsal was called for three and I had barely time to get hold of my girl.

This brings me to Sadie Farrell, a very important character in my story.

I had been keeping company with her for a short while. At least I considered that I did, though she denied it. She scorned me. That was her way. Sadie had always lived at home. Her father and mother were dead now, and she lived with her sister. Like all home girls she was crazy to see a bit of life. Her heart was set on being a high-class detective. That was the only hold I had over her. I had promised her that the first time I had occasion to engage a woman operative, I would take her.

Moreover, Sadie was full of curiosity concerning Miss Hamerton, whose praises I was always singing. She was never jealous though. Sadie had a wise little head, and she knew the difference between the feeling I had for that wonderful woman, and for her darling self.

Sadie was at home when I got there. "What, you!" she said, making out to be bored to death. "I thought I was going to have a peaceful afternoon."

I couldn't resist teasing her a little. "Cheer up," I said. "I'm going right away again. I thought maybe you'd like to come out with me."

"On a week day!" she said scornfully. "Run along with you, man, I've got something better to do."

"I bet I can make you come," I said.

She tossed her head. "You know very well you can't make me do anything."

"I bet you a dollar I can make you come."

She smelled a mouse. "What are you getting at?" she demanded.

"I wanted to take you to the theatre."

"It's too late for a matinee."

"How about a rehearsal?"

Her eyes sparkled. "A rehearsal! Wouldn't that be wonderful! Oh, you're only fooling me."

"Not at all," I said, "Miss Hamerton herself invited you."

"Miss Hamerton! Shall I see her?"

"Sure. And what's more, you are the person to be rehearsed."

She simply stared at me.

"She offers you a small part in her company," I drawled.

"Me!" said the amazed Sadie. "Why—how—how did it happen?"

"Well you see, I have come to the point where I need an operative in the company, and I got her to take you."

"When is it?" she gasped.

"Three o'clock," I said. It was then twenty minutes to.

Sadie rushed to me and gave my arms a little squeeze. "Oh, Ben, you darling fool!" she cried, and ran for her hat before I could follow up my advantage.

On the way down town I coached her in what she must do. She mustn't let it be suspected that she had never acted before. She must tell the stage manager she had been sent by Mrs. Mendoza, the agent. She must ask forty dollars a week and come down to thirty. She must make out that the part was much inferior to those she had been playing. After the rehearsal she was to come to my office, where Miss Hamerton would meet us, and give her a lesson in making up.

Sadie simply nodded her wise little head like a bird and said nothing. Only at the prospect of receiving instruction from the wonderful Irma Hamerton herself, did her eyes gleam again. I didn't have time then to tell her what she had to know about the case. I let her get out at the station nearest the theatre, while I went on to my office. It was safer, of course, for me not to appear at the rehearsal as Sadie's sponsor.

I had no doubt of Sadie's acquitting herself creditably. If I had had, no matter what my personal feelings were, I would not have employed her in this case. But she was as wise as she was pretty. Under those scornful airs she was as true as steel, and she had the rare faculty of keeping a close tongue in her head.

Sadie had a sort of Frenchy look, long, narrow eyes and pointed chin. This just happened to suit the part of the maid in the play. If I had looked a month I could not have found a better girl, not to speak of the pleasure I anticipated in working side by side with my own girl. Moreover, I was hoping by my conduct of the case to force Sadie to admit that I was not quite such a bonehead as she liked to make out.

Everything went off as planned. Sadie I heard, made a good impression at rehearsal, and at a nod from Miss Hamerton, the stage manager engaged her. Miss Hamerton told me afterwards that Sadie went through the rehearsal like an old stager. They arrived at my office separately, and the lesson in making up was given. Miss Hamerton laid herself out to be kind to Sadie. I think she scented a romance. Anyhow, inside five minutes Sadie was hers body and soul. Like me, she would have stopped at nothing to serve her.

After that I told Sadie all the facts in the case. In her woman's way of reasoning she arrived at the same conclusion that I had reached after my style.

"It's the work of a clever gang," she said. "They have put a member, perhaps more than one in the company."

"But what a lot of trouble to take," I objected, "since the necklace was not known to be of any great value."

"Somebody knew."

"If they knew about blue pearls they must also have known that Mount was the only buyer."

"Maybe they were shipped to India," she said. "I suspect that East Indians have forgotten more about pearls than Mr. Mount ever knew."

The very first time she appeared on the stage, Sadie justified my confidence in her powers. Notwithstanding the excitement of making her debut, she managed to keep her wits about her. Women are wonderful that way. During her only scene on the stage she had to wait at one side for a few minutes. While she stood there close to the canvas scene she heard a bit of a conversation on the other side of it. Unfortunately she had not been in the company long enough to recognise the voices.

A man said. "Yes, sir, forty thousand dollars."

"Go way!" was the reply. "How do you know?"

"I saw it entered in his bank book. I was in his dressing-room, and I saw it on the table. When he went out I looked in it out of curiosity. He deposited forty thousand dollars last week."

"Where do you suppose he got it?"

"Search me."

"Some fellows have all the luck, don't they?"

Then the voices passed out of hearing.

6

I have not mentioned Mr. Alfred Mount lately though I saw him often on matters connected with the case. He was an interesting character. It was only by degrees that I realised what an extraordinary man I had to deal with. After our first meeting his manner towards me completely changed. He appeared to be sorry for his brusqueness on that occasion. Now he was all frankness and friendliness. Nothing crude, you understand, just the air of one man of the world towards another. I could not help but feel flattered by it.

While we worked together so amicably the mutual antagonism remained. I knew he still resented Miss Hamerton's having employed me without consulting him, and I believed that he was working independently. For my part, you may be sure, I told him nothing but what I had to. I found no little pleasure in blocking his subtle questioning by my air of clumsy innocence. I told him nothing about the cryptogram.

I never called at his office again. Sometimes he dropped into mine, his bright eyes wandering all around, but more often I called on him at his apartment over the store. For he occupied the second floor of the beautiful little building which housed his business. There was however nothing of the old-fashioned shop-keeper about his place. I never saw such splendour before or since. But it took you a while to realise that it was splendour, for there was nothing showy or garish. Everything he possessed was the choicest of its kind in the world. Even with my limited knowledge, when I stopped to figure up the value of what I saw, I was staggered. I saw enough at different times to furnish several millionaires.

Mount had a strange love for his treasures in which there was nothing of the usual self-glorification of millionaires. He had a modest, almost a tender, way of referring to his things, of handling them. I learned quite a lot about tapestries, rugs, Chinese porcelains, enamels, ivories and gold workmanship from his talk. He did not care for paintings.

"Too insistent," he said. "Paintings will not merge."

The man was full of queer sayings, which he would drawl out with an eye to the effect he was creating on you.

He never allowed daylight to penetrate to his principal room, a great hall two stories high, lined with priceless tapestries.

"Daylight is rude and unmanageable," he said. "Artificial light I can order to suit my mood."

Another odd thing was his antipathy to red. That colour almost never appeared in his treasures. In the tapestries greens predominated; the rugs were mostly old blues and yellows. The great room never looked quite the same. Sometimes it was completely metamorphosed over night. I understood from something he let fall that the other floors of the building were stored with his treasures. He had them brought down and arranged according to his fancy. The only servant ever visible was a silent Hindoo, who sometimes appeared in gorgeous Eastern costume, encrusted with jewels. It occurred to me that that was how his master ought to dress. The sober clothes of a business man, however elegant, were out of place on Mount. Long afterwards I learned that it was his custom when alone to array himself like an Eastern potentate, but I never saw him dressed that way.

One day, to see what he would say, I asked him point blank what was the value of Miss Hamerton's lost pearls.

He consulted a note-book. "She paid me at different times exactly twenty-five thousand, seven hundred for them."

"I know," I said quietly. "But what was their value?"

He bored me through and through with his jetty eyes before answering. Finally he smiled—he had a charming smile when he chose, and spread out his hands in token of surrender. His hands were too white and beautiful for a man's.

"I see you know the truth," he said. "Well—I am in your hands. I hope you will keep the secret. Only a great deal of unhappiness could result from its becoming known."

"I shall not tell," I said. "But how much are they worth."

"I really couldn't say," he said frankly. "There is nothing like them in the world, nothing to measure them by, I mean. It would depend simply on how far the purchaser could go."

"Wouldn't they be difficult to dispose of?"

"Very. That is our hope in the present situation."

"Do you suppose the thief knew what he was getting?"

"I doubt it. To distinguish the blue cast is a fad of my own. They ordinarily go with the black pearls."

Later he returned to the subject of his own accord. "Since you have learned or guessed so much, I should tell you the whole story, for fear you might have a doubt of Miss Hamerton."

"No danger of that," I said quickly.

He looked at me strangely. I suppose he was wondering if I presumed to rival him there. He immediately went on smoothly:

"She, of course, has no suspicion of the true value of the pearls. Nor does she guess that they were in my possession for years. I let her have them one or two at a time. Do you blame me—" he spread out his expressive hands again.

"They are the most beautiful pearls in all the world," he murmured softly, "the fruit of all my knowledge and my patience. Pearls in a case are not pearls. Only when they lie on the warm bosom of a woman are pearls really pearls. I wished to have the pleasure of seeing Irma—Miss Hamerton wearing them. I could not give them to her. So I devised this innocent deception. Wouldn't you have done the same?"

Maybe I would. Anyhow I didn't feel called upon to argue the matter with him, so I kept my mouth shut.

His long eyes narrowed. "If you had seen her wear the real pearls you would understand better," he said dreamily. "They glowed as if with pleasure in their situation. Her skin is so tender that the veins give it a delicate bluish cast exactly matched by my exquisite pearls!"

To me there was something—what would you say, something delicately indecent in the way Mount spoke of Miss Hamerton. It made me indignant deep down. But I said nothing.

"I am a fool about precious stones," he went on with that disarming smile. "No shop-keeper has any right to indulge in a personal passion for his wares. Pearls come first with me, then diamonds. Would you like to see my diamonds?"

Without waiting for any answer he disappeared into the next room. I heard the ring of a burglar-proof lock. Presently he returned bearing a little black velvet cushion on which lay a necklet of gleaming fire.

"I am no miser," he said smiling. "Quantity does not appeal to me, nor mere bigness. Only quality. This is my whole collection, seventy-two stones, the result of thirty years' search for perfection."

I gazed at the fiery spots speechlessly. Before taking this case I had never thought much of precious stones. They had seemed like pretty things to me, and useless. But upon looking at these I could understand Miss Hamerton's reference to her pearls as living things. These diamonds were alive—devilishly alive. They twinkled up at Mount like complaisant little slaves outvying each other to flatter their master. The sheer beauty of them caught at the breast. Their fire bit into a man's soul. Seeing it, I could understand the ancient lusts to rob and murder for bits of stone like these.

"Aren't they lovely?" Mount murmured.

"Yes, like a snake," I blurted out.

He laughed. "That feeling seems strange to me. I love them."

"Put them away!" I said.

He continued to laugh. He caressed the diamonds with his long, white fingers. "Wouldn't you like to see Miss Hamerton wear them?" he asked softly.

"No, by God!" I cried. "She's a good woman."

He laughed more than ever. It was a kind of Oriental laugh, soft, unwholesome. "I'm afraid you suffer from the Puritan confusion of the ideas of beauty and evil," he said.

"Maybe I do," I said shortly.

"Some other time I will show you my emeralds and sapphires," he said.

I hated the things, yet I was eager to see them. That shows the effect they had on you. I was struck by his omission of rubies.

"How about rubies?" I asked.

He shivered. "I do not care for rubies. They are an ugly color."

I welcomed the chill, raw air of the street after that scented chamber. After the elegant collector of jewels my crude and commonplace fellow-citizens seemed all that was honest and sturdy. I was proud of them. Yet I enjoyed going to Mount's rooms, too. One could count on being thrilled one way or another.

7

As time went on I dismissed the women of the company from my calculations—though I still kept an eye on them through Sadie. Of the men I had most to do with two, Roland Quarles and Kenton Milbourne, the first because I liked him, and the second because I didn't.

Though I had no evidence against him, the idea that Milbourne was the thief had little by little fixed itself in my mind. It was largely a process of elimination. All the others had proved to my satisfaction one way or another that they couldn't have committed the robbery. With the exception of Quarles, none of them had the brains to conceive of such a plan, or to hide it afterwards. I didn't know if Milbourne had the brains, indeed the more I went with him the less I knew. Yet he did not seem to have a guard over himself. I laid several ingenious little traps to get a sight of his bank-book, but did not succeed in finding out even if he possessed such a thing.

Milbourne was a pasty, hatchet-faced individual, very precise and conscientious in his manner, and exceedingly talkative. That was what put me off. He talked all the time, but I learned nothing from it. With his sharp, foxy features and narrow-set eyes he had the look of a crook right enough, but after all looks are not so important as disposition, and this heavy, dull-witted, verbose fellow was the epitome of respectability. He was not at all popular in the company, principally, I fancy, because of his over-nicety. He bragged of the number of baths he took. He was not "a good fellow." He never joked nor carried on with the crowd. In the play he took the part of a brutal thug, a sort of Bill Sykes, and played it well though there was nothing in his appearance to suggest the part. He was the fox, not the bull-dog. Imagine a man with the appearance of a fox and the voice of a sheep and you have Milbourne.

Shortly after I joined the company I was allotted to share his dressing-room. He told me that he had requested the stage-manager to make the change, because he objected to the personal habits of his former roommate. So I had every opportunity to observe him. A lot of good it did me. He talked me to sleep. He would recite all the news of the day which I had just read for myself, and commented on it like a country newspaper. You couldn't stop him.

Roland Quarles I cultivated for a different reason. I did not suspect him. As a popular leading juvenile his life for years had been lived in the public eye and there was no reason in the world save pure cussedness why he should be a thief. I liked him. I was working hard, but one can't be a detective every waking minute. I sought out Roland to forget my work. I had started disinterestedly with the whole company, but I gradually came to feel an affection for Roland, principally because, much to my surprise, he seemed to like me.

I have said he was a morose young man. Such was my first impression. He did not make friends easily. He was hated by all the men of the company, because he despised their foolish conceit, and took no pains to hide it. But the women liked him, I may say all women were attracted to him. He did not plume himself on this, it was a matter of great embarrassment to him. He avoided them no less than the men.

He was exceedingly good-looking and graceful, and there was not the slightest consciousness of it in his bearing. In that among young actors he stood alone. He had a sort of proud, reserved, bitter air, or as a novelist would say, he seemed to cherish a secret sorrow. His mail at the theatre was enormous. He used to stuff it in his pocket without looking at it.

I got my first insight into his character from his treatment of me. Of the entire company he and Milbourne were the only members who never made my meek insignificance a target for unkind wit. Of them all only this high and mighty young man never tried to make me feel my insignificance. For a while he ignored me, but it seemed to strike him at last that I was being put upon by the others, whereupon in an unassuming way he began to make little overtures of friendship. I was charmed.

One night after the show he offered me a cigar at the stage door, and we walked down the street smoking and chatting until our ways parted. He was not on during the second act, and after my brief scene I got in the habit of stopping a while in his room before I went up to change. He had good sense. It was worth while talking to him. We became very friendly. He was only a year or two younger than I, but to me he seemed like a mere kid.

One night in the middle of our talk he said: "You're not like an actor. You're human."

"Don't you like actors?" I asked curiously.

"It's a rotten business for men," he said bitterly. "It unsexes them. But here I am! What am I to do about it?"

I learned as I knew him better that the popular young actor, notwithstanding the adulation of women—or perhaps because of it, led an exemplary life. The dazzling palaces of the Great White Way knew him not. It was his custom to go home after the show, have a bite to eat in solitude, and read until he turned in.

One night he invited me to accompany him home. He had a modest flat in the Gramercy Square neighbourhood with an adoring old woman to look after him. The cheerful fire, the shaded lamp, the capacious easy chair, gave me a new conception of bachelor comfort. Books were a feature of the place.

"Pretty snug, eh?" he said, following my admiring eyes.

"Well, you're not like an actor either," said I.

He laughed. "After the theatre this is like Heaven!"

"Why don't you chuck it?" I asked. "You're young."

He shrugged. "Who wants to give an actor a regular job?"

We had scrambled eggs and sausages. I stayed for a couple of hours talking about the abstract questions that young men loved to discuss. When I left he was as much of an enigma to me as when I arrived. He was willing to talk about anything under the sun—except himself. Without appearing to, he foiled all my attempts to draw him out.

Hard upon this growing friendship it was a shock to learn from Sadie as a result of her work during the days, that it was Roland Quarles who had deposited forty thousand dollars in his bank.

"Impossible!" I said in my first surprise.

"I got it direct from the bank," she said. "It was the Second National. He deposited forty thousand in cash on April Sixth."

My heart sunk.

"But that doesn't prove that he stole the pearls," said Sadie. She shared my liking for the young fellow.

"I hope not," I said gloomily. "But if it wasn't he then our promising clue is no good."

"Maybe he won it on the Stock Exchange."

"That doesn't explain the cash. No broker pays in cash."

"Well I can think of ten good reasons why he couldn't have done it," Sadie said obstinately. She had too warm a heart, perhaps, to make an ideal investigator.

That night Roland asked me home to supper again. This was about a week after the first occasion. The old woman had gone to bed and he cooked creamed oysters in a chafing-dish, while I looked at the paper.

"Wouldn't it be nice to have white hands waiting at home to do that for you?" I suggested teasingly.

"Never for me!" he said with a bitter smile.

"Why not?"

"What I can have I don't want. What I want I can never have."

"You never can tell," I said encouragingly. I was thinking what a superb couple the handsome young pair made on the stage. It seemed low to cross-examine him while he was preparing to feed me, but there was no help for it.

"The market is off again," I said carelessly. "Chance for somebody to make money."

"How can you make money when the market is going down," he said innocently.

If the innocence was assumed it was mighty well done. However, I told myself his business was acting.

"By selling short," I said.

"I never understood that operation."

I explained it.

"Too complicated for me," he said. "I consider the whole business immoral."

I agreed, and switched to talk of solid, permanent investments. He immediately looked interested.

"You seem to know something about such matters," he said. "Suppose a man had a little money to invest, what would you advise?"

"Your savings?" I asked with a smile.

"Lord! I couldn't save anything. No, I have a friend who has a few thousand surplus."

Being anxious to believe well of him I snatched at this straw. Maybe a friend had entrusted him with money to invest. Hardly likely though, and still more unlikely that it would be handed over in cash. I gave him some good advice, and the subject was dropped.

Later we got to talking about acting again. He said in his bitter way:

"I shall soon be out of it now, one way or the other."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean to leave the stage at the close of this engagement or before."

"What are you going to do?"

"God knows!" he said with his laugh. "Go to the devil, I expect."

I couldn't get anything else out of him. It was all mysterious enough. He sounded utterly reckless when you got below the surface, but somehow it was not the recklessness of a crook.

Worse was to follow.

First, however, I must put down how the situation stood with Milbourne, because I shall not return to him for some time. Kenton Milbourne! I have to smile every time I write it, the fancy appellation was so unsuitable to the tallow-cheeked, hatchet-faced talker who bore it. I believed Milbourne had stolen the pearls, and I worked hard to justify my belief, but without being able to lay anything bare against him.

Every night he talked me to a standstill. He seemed to be a man totally devoid of individuality, temperament, a mere windbag. But I told myself that dullness is the favourite and most effective disguise of a sharper. His talk was a little too dull to be natural, and once in a while I received an impression that he was anything but dull.

One night I said to him as Roland had said to me: "You don't seem like an actor. How did you get into this business?"

"Drifted into it," he said. "Always knew I could act, but was too busy with other things. I had an attack of typhoid in Sydney four years ago which shattered my health. When I was getting better a friend gave me the part of a human monster to play, just to help me pass the time. I made a wonderful hit in it. They wouldn't let me stop. Since then I've never been idle. I haven't any conceit, so they offer me the horrible parts."

"Sydney?" I said.

"I was raised in Australia. I came to America last Fall because there was a wider field for my art."

I put this down in my mind as a lie. I do not know Australia but I suppose they have their own peculiarities of speech, and this man talked good New York.

I asked idly what parts he had played in Australia. He named three or four and I made careful mental notes of them. I thought I had him there.

The next day I consulted old files of an Australian stage paper in the rooms of the Actors' Society. To my chagrin I found his name, Kenton Milbourne listed in the casts of the very plays he had mentioned. I was far from being convinced of his genuineness, however. I wrote to Australia for further information.

Under cover of my meek and gentle air, I continued to watch him close. I could have sworn he was not aware of it, which shows how you may fool yourself. His apparent stupidity still blocked me. But one night when he lifted the tray of his trunk I saw the edge of a book underneath.

"Anything good to read?" I said, picking it up before he could stop me.

A peculiar look chased across his face, which was anything but stupidity. The title of the book was: "The World's Famous Jewels."

"Aha! my man!" I thought. I dropped it, saying: "That's not in my line."

This was how matters stood when things began to happen which drove all thought of Kenton Milbourne out of my mind.

The next day Sadie came into the office to report, looking so confoundedly pretty that it drove the detective business clean out of my mind for the moment. What with her thirty dollars a week from the theatre and her additional salary as operative (which Miss Hamerton insisted on her taking) Sadie was in affluent circumstances, and for the first time in her life she was able to dress as a pretty girl ought. With her Spring hat and suit, her dainty gloves and boots, all from the best shops, she was as smart a little lady as you'd find from one end of the Avenue to the other.

"You look sweet enough to eat!" I said, grinning at her like a Cheshire cat.

"Cut it out!" she said with her high and mighty air. "It's business hours. I'm operative S.F."

"What's that for, swell figure?"

"Wait till after the whistle blows."

"After hours you're Miss Covington the actress, and I'm not allowed to know you."

"Well, there's Sunday."

"But this is only Tuesday."

"I've got to respect my boss, haven't I?"

"What if I kissed you anyhow?"

"I'd box your ears!" she said quick as lightning.

And she would. I sighed, and came back to earth. It was not that I was afraid of the box on the ears, but she was right, and I knew it. As soon as I started that line of talk I resigned my proper place as the boss of the establishment.

"What's new?" I asked.

"I found out something interesting to-day," she said. "Miss Hamerton's in love with Roland Quarles."

"I guessed that long ago," I said calmly.

Sadie was much taken aback. Evidently she had expected to stun me. "You never said anything about it," she said pouting.

"I left it for you to find out for yourself."

"She never believed he had anything to do with the robbery," Sadie said with a touch of defiance.

"Then why was she so distressed in the beginning?"

"Well, there was something that would have looked like evidence to a man," said Sadie scornfully. "So naturally she didn't want to tell you."

"Did she tell you?" I asked, a little huffed at the thought that Sadie was getting deeper in the confidence of my client than I.

"Yes, to-day. She didn't tell me about her feelings, of course. I guessed that part."

"What is this mysterious thing?"

"She only told me because since she saw the cryptogram she knows there couldn't be anything in it."

This was getting denser instead of more clear. "What was there about the cryptogram that eased her mind?" I asked.

"She knows that it couldn't have been written to Roland Quarles because he has no idea of leaving the company."

"Oh, hasn't he!" I thought to myself. How strangely loving women reason. Aloud I said: "Now for the thing that a mere man would have considered evidence."

"Don't try to be sarcastic," said Sadie. "It doesn't suit you."

"Who's forgetting that I'm the boss now?" I said severely.

She made a face at me and went on: "It seems that Miss Hamerton and Roland Quarles had a bet on about the pearls."

This was something new. I pricked up my ears.

"She laughed at him because he thought he knew something about jewels, and she says he scarcely knows a pearl from an opal. They argued about it, and she finally bet him a box of cigars against a box of gloves that he wouldn't be able to tell when she wore the genuine pearls. That is how she came to wear them the night they were stolen."

"The devil!" I exclaimed.

"But he has never spoken about it since. She believes that he has forgotten all about the bet."

I walked up and down the room considering what this meant.

"You needn't look like that," said Sadie. "We know he didn't do it. Wouldn't he have paid his bet if he had?"

"It seems so," I said. I didn't know what to believe.

"There's another reason," said Sadie, "sufficient for a woman."

"What's that?"

"He's in love with her. He's making love to her now. He couldn't do that if he had robbed her."

"I don't know," I said grimly. "If he could rob her, I suspect he could make love to her."

That night at the theatre I devoted my attention pretty exclusively to Quarles. God knows I was not anxious to ruin the young fellow, but Sadie's communication taken in connection with the cryptogram and that mysterious cash deposit was beginning to look like pretty strong evidence. This being my first case, I attached more importance to "evidence" than I would now.

I was in his dressing-room when he left to go on for the third act. He had only a short scene at the beginning, and as he went out, he asked me to wait till he came off.

I watched him go with a sinking heart for I hated to do what I had to do. He was so handsome, so graceful, and with that burden on his breast, so invariably kind to me, I felt like a wretch. Nevertheless, I told myself for the sake of all of us I had to discover the painful secret he was hiding.

I knew exactly how long I had before he would return. I swung the door almost shut, as if the wind had blown it, and made a rapid, thorough search. There was a pile of letters on his dressing-table as yet unopened. Nothing suspicious there. Nothing in the drawers of his dressing-table. There was no trunk in the room. His street coat was on a form hanging from a hook. I frisked the pockets. There was a handful of letters, papers in the breast pocket. Shuffling them over I came upon a sheet of "dimity" note-paper without an envelope. Opening it I beheld a communication in cryptogram exactly like the other.

I could hear the voices on the stage. Roland was about to come off. I hastily returned all the papers to his pocket as I had found them,—except the cryptogram. That I put in my own pocket.

When he came in we picked up our conversation where we had dropped it.

As soon as I got home I made haste to translate my find. I had saved the numerical key I used before. I instantly found that it fitted this communication also. This is what I got:

"I. has known of her loss for a couple of weeks. She has put two detectives in the company. Faxon and the girl Covington. I have this straight. Watch yourself. J."

So this is why Quarles cultivated my friendship! I thought, feeling all the bitterness of finding myself betrayed. I could no longer doubt my evidence. My friendly feelings for the young fellow were curdled.

8

I woke up next morning with a leaden weight on my breast. I had no zest in the day which bore with it the necessity of telling Miss Hamerton what I had learned. I put off the evil moment as long as possible. During the morning Sadie came into the office for instructions. I had not the heart to tell her. I sent her over to Newark on a wild goose chase in connection with some of McArdle's activities.

I was not expecting Miss Hamerton that afternoon. At three I called her up and said that I had something important to report. She said she was expecting some one later, and did not want to go out. Could I come to her? This pleased me, for since I had to strike her down it was more merciful to do it at home. I went.

She had never looked lovelier. Her room was a bower of Spring flowers, and she in a pale yellow dress was like the fairest daffodil among them. She was full of happiness, her cheeks glowing, her eyes sparkling. It did not make my task any easier. I angrily rebelled from it. But she was already asking me what was the matter.

I told her bunglingly enough, God knows, of the second cryptogram and where I had found it. It crushed her like a flower trodden underfoot.

Presently, however, she began to fight. "The first thing the thief would do when he found himself under surveillance," she faltered, "would be to try to divert your attention to some one else."

"He would hardly choose one ordinarily so far above suspicion as the leading man," I said reluctantly.

"He may have known, since he knows so much, that you were already suspicious of Ro—of the other." She could not get his name out.

I felt like the criminal myself, trying to convince her against her heart. "Taken by itself the letter would not be conclusive, but with the other things——"

"What other things?"

"Well, his provoking you by a bet to wear the genuine pearls."

"There's nothing in that," she said quickly. "If he had had an ulterior motive he would have spoken of the bet since. He would have lost it, wouldn't he, to keep us from suspecting?"

I conceded the reasonableness of this—taken by itself. "But his bank account?"

"Bank account?" she repeated, startled. We had not told her of this.

"On April sixth Mr. Quarles deposited forty thousand dollars in cash in the Second National Bank."

All the light went out of her face. "Oh! Are you sure?" she gasped.

"I have seen the entry in his pass-book. I verified it at the bank."

Her heart still fought for him. "But my necklace was worth only twenty-five thousand. And a thief would never be able to realise the full value of it."

I shrugged. Naturally I did not care to add to her unhappiness by telling her that the pearls were worth half a million. She thought from my shrug that I meant to convey that if her lover had been guilty of one theft why not others?

It crushed her anew. She had no more fight left in her. She sank back dead white and bereft of motion. "He's coming here," she whispered. "What shall I say to him? What shall I say?"

"Don't see him," I cried.

"I must. I promised."

I sat there, I don't know for how long, staring at the carpet like a clown.

The telephone rang and we both jumped as at a pistol shot.

I offered to answer it, but she waved me back. She went to the instrument falteringly—but I was surprised at the steadiness of her voice. "What is it?" she asked.

"Let him come up," she said firmly. By her stricken white face I knew who it was.

I jumped up in a kind of panic. "I will have myself carried up to the roof garden so I won't meet him," I said.

"No, please," she murmured. "I want you here."

"But he must not meet me!" I cried.

"Wait in the next room." Her voice broke piteously. "Oh, I must have some one here—some one I can trust!"

What was I to do? I obeyed very unwillingly. As soon as he entered I found that the transom over the door was open, and I could hear everything that passed between them. Of all the difficult things that have been forced on me in the way of business, that half hour's eavesdropping was as bad as any.

He must have been highly wrought up because he apparently never noticed her state. His very first speech was tragically unfortunate. He spoke in a harsh strained voice as if the painful thing he had kept hidden so long was breaking out in spite of him.

"Irma, how soon can you replace me in the cast?"

"Eh?" she murmured. I could imagine the painful start she suppressed.

"I want to get out. I can't stand it any longer."

"But why?" she whispered.

"I hate acting! It is not a man's work."

"Have you just discovered it?" she asked with a little note of scorn very painful to hear.

"No," he said gloomily, "I've always known. If I had been left to myself I never would have acted. But I came of a family of actors. I was brought up to it. I kept on because it was all I knew. It is only since I have acted with you that it has become more than I can bear."

"Why, with me?" she whispered.

"Because I love you!" he said in a harsh, abrupt voice.

"Ah!" The sound was no more than a painful catch in her breath.

"Oh, you needn't tell me I'm a presumptuous fool," he burst out. "I know it already. You don't know the height of my presumption yet. I love you! The silly make-believe of love that I have to go through every night with you drives me mad! I love you! I am ashamed to make my living by exhibiting a pretence of love!"

"It was your father's profession and your mother's," she murmured.

"They were the real thing," he said gloomily. "They had a genuine call. They loved their work. I hark back to an earlier strain, I guess. I have no feeling for art to make it worth while. I hate the tinsel and show and make-believe. I want to lead a real life with you——!"

No man has any right to hear another man bare his heart like this. I went to the open window and leaned out. I had forgotten Roland's supposed guilt. My instinct told me that a guilty man could not have spoken like this.

Even on the window-sill though I tried not to hear, an occasional word reached me. We were so high up that little of the street noises reached us. Bye and bye I heard Roland say "money" and I was drawn back into the room. This, I felt, it was my business to hear.

He was still pleading with his heart in his voice. "A month ago I would just have left without saying anything to you. I don't even know that I am fit for anything else but acting. I could not ask you to give it up without having something else to offer you. I suffer so to see you on the stage. To see your name, your person, your doings all public property drives me wild! I cannot stand seeing you show your lovely self to the applause of those vulgar fools!"

"You are mad!" she whispered.

"I know—but I have had a stroke of luck——!"

"Luck?"

"I have come into some money. Oh, nothing much, but enough to give me a start in some new country—if you could come with me! Oh, I am a fool to think it. But I had to tell you I loved you. You would be quite justified in laughing, and showing me the door. But I love you! It seemed cowardly to go away without telling you."

"You are asking me to give up my profession?" she murmured unsteadily.

"I ask nothing. I expect nothing. But if you could—! You'd have to give it up. It would kill me otherwise. I could stand better having none of you than half." He laughed harshly. "Am I not ridiculous? Tell me to go."

"I am not so enamoured of make-believe either," she murmured.

She was weakening! I trembled for her. This wretched business had to be cleared up before they could hope for any happiness.

"If I loved you I could give it up," she whispered, "but I am not sure."

It was like a glimpse of Heaven to him. "Irma!" He cried her name over and over brokenly. "My dear love! Then there is a chance—I never expected—Oh! don't raise me up only to cast me down lower than before!"

I went to the window-sill again and leaned out.

There I was still when she came in. She was trembling and breathing fast.

"He has gone," she said.

She led me back into the outer room. She noticed that the transom was open. "You heard?" she said startled.

"Some," I said uncomfortably. "More than I wanted to."

"I don't care," she said.

"Have you promised to marry him?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I have promised nothing. I asked for time."

"Good!" I said involuntarily.

She looked at me startled. "You heard!" she said defiantly. "Were they the words of a guilty man?"

"Not if I know anything about human nature," I said promptly.

The sweetest gratitude lighted up her face. "Oh, thank you!" she said. She was very near tears. "Anything else would be unbelievable!"

"Give me one day more," I suggested.

"No! No!" she cried with surprising energy. "I will not carry this tragic farce any further. I hate the pearls now. I would not wear them if I did get them back. They are gone. Let them go!"

"But Miss Hamerton——" I persisted.

"Not another word!" she cried. "My mind is made up!"

"I must speak," I said doggedly. "Because you as much as said you depended on getting honest advice from me. You can't stop now. If you marry Mr. Quarles, the fact that you have suspected him though it was only for a moment will haunt you all your life. No marriage is a bed of roses. When trouble does come your grim spectre will invariably rise and mock you. It must be definitely laid in its grave before you can marry the man."

The bold style of my speech made her pause. I had never spoken to her in that way before. She eyed me frowning.

"I hope you know it's not the job I'm after," I went on. "I never had work to do that I enjoyed less. But you put it up to me to give you honest advice."

"I can't spy on the man I love," she faltered.

"You can't marry the man you suspect," I returned.

"I don't suspect him."

"The suspicious circumstances are not yet explained."

"Very well, then, I'll send for him to come back, and he will explain them."

I had a flash of insight into the character of my young friend. "No!" I cried. "If he knew that you had ever suspected him, he would never forgive you."

"Then what do you want me to do?" she cried.

"Give me twenty-four hours to produce proofs of his innocence."

She gave in with a gesture.

Leaving Miss Hamerton I walked twice around Bryant Square to put my thoughts in order. I wished to believe in Roland's innocence almost as ardently as she did, but I had to force myself to keep an open mind. A fixed idea one way or the other is fatal to any investigator. So I argued against him for a while to strike a balance. I told myself there was a type of man who would stop at absolutely nothing to secure the woman he desired. In the bottom of my heart, like anybody else, I had a sneaking admiration for the type.

True, I had never heard of a man robbing a woman in order to secure the means to support her. Still, human psychology is an amazing thing. You never can tell! I reminded myself of all the other times I had been brought face to face with the apparently impossible. Particularly is human nature ingenious in justifying itself.

I finally made up my mind to search Roland's apartment that night. On my previous visits I had marked a little safe there. Surely it must contain some conclusive evidence one way or the other. What I hoped to find was some natural and honest explanation of the sum of money he had received.

Around the theatre that night Roland and I were as friendly as usual. The shadow was somewhat lifted from his dark eyes. They burned with an expectant fire. An extraordinary restlessness possessed him. For all he said he hated it, that time anyway, he outdid himself in playing his rôle. As far as I could see, he and Irma held no communications outside the play.

In pursuance of the plan I had made, I insisted on his supping with me that night. I was free to leave the theatre after the second act, so I went on ahead to order the supper I said. He was to meet me at the Thespis club at half-past eleven. I did order the supper there, then hurried on to his flat, arriving some time before his customary hour of coming from the theatre.

His old housekeeper having seen me in his company on several occasions expressed no surprise at my coming. I said I would wait for him, and she left me to my own devices in the front room. I satisfied myself that she had gone to her own room on the other side of the kitchen, three doors away, then I set to work.

I had brought a bunch of skeleton keys and a set of miniature housebreaking tools. I didn't require them, for I found that the little safe had one of the earliest and simplest forms of a lock. Part of my apprenticeship had been spent in learning how to open such locks merely by listening to the fall of the tumblers as one turned the knob. All that was required was patience. It was a little after ten. Supposing that Roland waited for me at the Thespis club only half an hour, I had two hours in which to work. It was painfully exciting. I had my first glimpse of the point of view of a housebreaker.

The safe door swung open at last. I looked inside with a beating heart. It contained but little; a diary, which I left for the moment; a wallet containing a sum of money, a bundle of papers enclosed by an elastic band. I went over the papers hastily; they consisted of insurance policies, theatrical contracts and business letters of old dates which had nothing whatever to do with my case.

However, there was still a little locked drawer to investigate. After a number of tries I fixed a key that would open it. The first thing I saw was a number of pieces of men's jewelry that Roland doubtless used for stage properties. The second thing I saw was a beautiful little antique box made of some sweet-smelling wood which contained several notes in Irma's handwriting and some withered flowers. The third and last thing was a seal leather case such as jewellers display. Upon pressing the spring the cover flew back and I saw lying on a bed of white velvet a string of wonderful dusky pearls.

For many moments I gazed at them in stupid astonishment. God knows what I expected to find. Certainly not that. What did it mean? It looked just the same as the string Miss Hamerton had showed me. I counted them. There were sixty-seven pearls. Was it another of Roberts' replicas? Perhaps Roland had bought it and stowed it away for sentimental reasons. That seemed pretty far-fetched.

I carried it to the electric light. There I could see the blue cast like the last gleam of light in the twilight sky. The bits of stone had a wonderful fire, life. An instinct told me they were genuine pearls. But if they were it must be the string, for Mount had said there were no others. I remembered that Miss Hamerton had told me she had made a little scratch on the clasp and I eagerly looked for it. There was a kind of mark there. At this point I shook my head and gave up speculating.

I slipped the case in my pocket, locked the drawer and locked the safe again. I switched off the lights and let myself quietly out of the flat.

I decided to go to the Thespis club as if nothing had happened. I was not at all anxious to meet Roland until I knew where I stood, but I reflected that if I failed him it might rouse his suspicions and precipitate a catastrophe before I was ready for it. There was not much danger that he would look in his safe that night if I kept him late. His housekeeper would tell him I had been there, but I could explain that. In the morning I would have him watched.

Roland was at the club when I arrived. "I've been at your rooms," I said instantly. "I had an idea I was to wait for you there. But I got thinking it over and decided I had made a mistake."

"You've got a memory like a colander," he said good-naturedly. "Better do something about it."

We sat down to our supper. Roland was in for him, extraordinary spirits. All the while we ate, drank and joked I was wondering in the back of my head what kind of a change would come over his grim, dark, laughing face if he knew what I had in my pocket.

9

Few would envy me my task next morning. I called up Miss Hamerton merely saying that I would come to the hotel half an hour later. Sadie came in, but having kept from her what had already happened, I could not tell her this. I was not obliged to tell her all the developments of the case, of course, but she had a moral right to my confidence, and so I felt guilty and wretched every way. Sadie I knew would be terribly cut up by the way things were tending, and I had not the heart to face it, with what I had to go through later.

Miss Hamerton received me with great bright eyes that looked out of her white face like stars at dawn. The instant she caught sight of my face she said: "You have news?"

I nodded.

"Good or bad?" she whispered breathlessly.

There was no use beating around the bush. "Bad," I said bluntly.

A hand went to her breast. "Tell me—quickly."

I drew out the case. She gave no sign of recognising it. I snapped it open. "Is this the lost necklace?" I asked.

With a little cry, she seized upon it, examined the pearls, breathed upon them, looked at the clasp. "Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed, joy struggling in her face with an underlying terror. "Where did you get it?"

"Out of a safe in Mr. Quarles' flat."

She looked at me stricken stupid.

I had to repeat the words.

"Oh!—you would not deceive me?" she whispered.

"I wish to God it were not true!" I cried.

"In his room—his room!" she muttered. Suddenly she sank down in a crumpled white heap on the floor.

I gathered her up in my arms and laid her on the sofa. I called Mrs. Bleecker, who came running, accompanied by Irma's maid. A senseless scene of confusion followed. The foolish women roused half the hotel with their outcries. I myself, carried the beautiful, inanimate girl into her bedroom. For me it was holy ground. It was almost as bare as a convent cell. It pleased me to find that she instinctively rejected luxury on retiring to her last stronghold. I laid her on her bed—the pillow was no whiter than the cheek it bore, and returned to the outer room to await the issue. All this time, I must tell you, Mrs. Bleecker was relieving her feelings by abusing me. From the first I had apprehended hatred in that lady.

I waited a few minutes, feeling very unnecessary, and wondering if I would not do better to return to my office, when Mrs. Bleecker came back, and with a very ill grace said that Miss Hamerton wanted to know if it was convenient for me to wait a little while until she was able to see me, and would I please say whatever was necessary to people who called. I almost wept upon receiving this message. I sent back word that I would stay all day if she wanted me. Mrs. Bleecker glared at me, almost beside herself with defeated curiosity. I had the necklace safe in my pocket and she was without a clue to what had happened.

So there I was established as Miss Hamerton's representative. Everybody took orders from me, and wondered who I was. The word had spread like wildfire that the famous star had been taken ill, and the telephone rang continuously. I finally told the hotel people what to say, and ordered it disconnected. I had a couple of boys stationed in the corridor to keep people from the door. I sent for two doctors, not that Irma was in any need of medical attention, but I wished to have the support of a professional bulletin. I told them what I thought necessary. They were discreet men.

Miss Hamerton had no close relatives, and I could not see the sense of sending for any others. I forbade Mrs. Bleecker to telegraph them. In a case of this kind solitude is the best, the most merciful treatment for the sufferer. As it was I pitied the poor girl having to endure the officious ministrations of her inquisitive servants, but I did not feel justified in interfering there.

Only two men were allowed past the guard in the corridor, Mr. Maurice Metz, the famous theatrical manager, and Mr. Alfred Mount. The former stormed about the room like a wilful child. His pocketbook was hard hit. I was firm. He could not see Miss Hamerton, he must be satisfied with my report. Miss Hamerton had suffered a nervous breakdown—with that phrase we guarded her piteous secret, and it would be out of the question for her to act for weeks to come. It was her wish that the company be paid off and disbanded.

"Who the devil are you?" he demanded.

"I speak for Miss Hamerton," I said with a shrug. I remembered how humbly I had besieged this man's door with my play a few weeks since, and now I was turning him down.

To satisfy him I had Mrs. Bleecker in. He demanded of her who I was.

"I don't know," she snapped.

Nevertheless she had to bear me out. Miss Hamerton had sent word that the company was to be paid off with two weeks' salary, and the amount charged to her. I referred Mr. Metz to the doctors. They impressed him with medical phrases he didn't understand. He finally departed talking to himself and waving his hands.

Mr. Mount, of course, was very different. He came in all suave sympathy, anxious to uphold me in every way. I had wished to see him for a special purpose. I couldn't allow the possibility of a ghastly mistake being made.

I produced the fateful little seal leather box, and snapped it open again. "Are these the lost pearls?" I asked.

The man had wonderful self-control. No muscle of his face changed. Only his black eyes flamed up. He took the case quietly, but those eyes pounced on the pearls like their prey, and wolfed them one by one. He returned the case to me. A curious smile wreathed the corners of his voluptuous mouth.

"Those are the pearls," he said quietly.

"You are sure?"

"Sure?" He spread out his hands. "There are no other such pearls in the world."

I returned the case to my pocket.

"Where did you find them?" he asked.

"At present I am not free to say how they were recovered," I replied. "No doubt Miss Hamerton will give it out later."

"I think I understand," he said with a compassionate air. "I suppose there will be no prosecution."

"I do not know," I said blandly.

"Maybe it would be better never to speak of the matter to her?" he said softly.

I shrugged. I wasn't going to let him get any change out of me.

"Anyhow it's a triumph for you," he said graciously. "Allow me to congratulate you."

Was there a faint ring of irony in his words? In either case I never felt less triumphant. What booted it to return her jewels if I had broken her heart? I bowed my acknowledgment.

As he left he said: "Come and see me sometimes, though the case is closed. You are too valuable a man for me to lose sight of."

I bowed again, mutely registering a resolve to ask him a thumping figure if he ever did require my services.

Meanwhile I had the reporters to deal with. I have a strong fellow-feeling for the boys. As a class they are the most human lot of fellows I know. They do not make the rotten conditions of their business. But they certainly are the devil to deal with when they get you on the defensive. They seemed to spread through that hotel like quicksilver, bribing the bell-boys, the maids, even the waiter who brought up my dinner. If we had not been on the eleventh story I should have expected to find them peeping in the windows.

I did not dare see them myself. In my anomalous position they would have made a monkey of me. In my mind's eye I could see the story of the mysterious stranger who claimed to represent Miss Hamerton, etc., etc. I had to take every precaution, too, to keep them from that fool of a Mrs. Bleecker. I carefully drilled the doctors in what they should say, and then sent them down to their fate. They came off better than I expected. Of course the lurid tales did appear next day, but they were away beside the mark. Nothing approaching the truth was ever published.

A little before five everybody had gone, and I was alone in the sitting-room gazing out of the window and indulging in gloomy enough thoughts, when I heard the door behind me open. I turned with a sigh, expecting fresh complaints and demands from the old harridan. But there was Irma trying to smile at me. She was wearing a white negligée affair that made her look like a fragile lily. She walked with a firm step, but her face shocked me. It looked dead. The eyes open, were infinitely more ghastly than when I had laid her down with them closed. Mrs. Bleecker and the maid followed, buzzing around her. She seemed to have reached the limits of her patience with them.

"Let me be!" she said as sharply as I ever heard her speak. "I am perfectly well able to walk and to speak. Please go back to the bedroom. I have business to discuss with Mr. Enderby."

They retired, bearing me no love in their hearts.

"I must go away, quite by myself," she said, speaking at random. "Can you help me find a place, some place where nobody knows me? If I do not get away from these people they will drive me mad!"

"I will find you a place," I said.

"Perhaps I'd better not go alone," she said. "If I could only find the right kind of person. I'm so terribly alone. That nice girl you brought into the company, Miss Farrell, do you think she would go with me?"

There was something in this more painful than I can convey. "She'd jump at the chance," I said brusquely.

"You have been so good to me," she said.

"You can say that!" I said, astonished.

"Oh, I've not quite taken leave of my senses," she said bitterly. "If I had not known the truth, it would have been much worse."

This struck me as extraordinary generosity in a woman who loved.

"I—I have something else to ask of you," she said in the piteous beseeching way that made me want to cast myself at her feet.

"Anything," I murmured.

"Mr. Quarles is coming here at five. Please see him and tell him—Oh! tell him anything you like, anything that will keep him from ever trying to see me again."

I nodded. "You had better lose no time in getting out of this," I suggested. "Can you be ready by to-morrow morning?"

"I will start packing now," she said. "It will give me something to do."

How well I understood the hideous blankness that faced her.

"Don't let those women bother you," I said. "Refer them to me."

"They mean well," she said.

"I will answer for Miss Farrell," I said. "She'll be here at nine to-morrow."

She started to thank me again, but I would not let her go on. I really could not stand it.

"Very well, you will see," she said with a smile, and left me.

Shortly afterwards Roland Quarles came striding down the hall. I opened the door to him. He was astonished to find a strange man in the room. He did not recognise me without my Faxon makeup.

"Enderby," I said in response to his enquiring glance. "You met me here once before."

"What's this I hear downstairs about Miss Hamerton being sick?" he demanded anxiously.

"She has had a nervous breakdown," I said.

He was not deceived. "What does that mean?" he demanded. "She was quite well yesterday."

I shrugged.

"Can I see her?"

I shook my head.

"I will speak to Mrs. Bleecker, then."

"You can't see her, either."

"Who are you?" he demanded, as so many others had done.

I gave him my card, hoping that he would take the hint, and save me further explanations.

Not a bit of it. "Investigator? What does that mean? Detective?"

"Precisely."

"What's it all about?" he cried irritably. "Why are you looking at me like a policeman?"

"Look at me close," I said.

He stared at me angry and puzzled. "I have seen you before—more than once——" Then his face changed. "Faxon!" he cried. "Is it Faxon?"

"The same," I said.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

This parade of innocence began to exasperate me. "Do you need to ask?" I said.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake don't play with words," he burst out. "Tell me what's the matter and be done with it."

"Miss Hamerton's pearl necklace was stolen from the theatre two months ago. She engaged me to recover it."

"Her pearls! Stolen!" he ejaculated, amazed. I could not have asked to see it better done.

"Do you still want me to go on?" I asked.

"Oh, drop the mystery!" he cried. "You fellows fatten on mystery!"

"As Faxon in the theatre I was perfectly sincere in my friendship for you," I went on. "I liked you. But little by little against my will I was forced to believe that you were the thief."

This touched him, but not quite in the way I expected. "Me? The thief?" he gasped—and suddenly burst into harsh laughter. "How did you arrive at that?"

I was no longer inclined to spare him. "In the first place you provoked a bet with Miss Hamerton which induced her to wear the real pearls on the night they were stolen."

His face turned grave. "True," he said. "I forgot that. What else?"

"On April sixth you deposited forty thousand dollars in cash in the Second National Bank."

He paled. "Anything more?"

"Do you care to explain where you got it?" I asked.

"Not to you," he said proudly. "Go on with your story."

"My first clue was in the cryptic letter found on the stage."

"I remember. You couldn't translate it."

"But I did."

"What's it got to do with me?"

"Nothing. But I found a second letter written in the same cryptogram and about the same matters in your pocket."

"That's a lie!" he said.

"If you want to see it it's at my office."

"If you did find such a paper in my pocket it was planted there."

"I should be glad to believe you were not the man," I said mildly.

"Spare me your assurances," he said scornfully.

He was silent for a while, thinking over what I had told him. Slowly horror grew in his face. "But—but this is only a devilish combination of circumstances," he stammered. "You haven't proved anything."

"The pearls have been recovered," I said.

"Where?" he shot at me.

"In your safe."

His legs failed him suddenly. He half fell in a chair, staring at me witlessly. "Oh, my God!" he muttered huskily. "Those, hers!"

I believe I smiled.

"And you—you have told her this story?" he faltered.

"That's what I was engaged for."

"Oh, my God!" he reiterated blankly. "What shall I do!"

His agony was genuine enough. In spite of myself I was moved by it. "Better go," I said. "The matter will be hushed up, of course."

"Hushed up!" he cried. "Never!"

This theatrical pretence of innocence provoked me afresh. "Oh, get out!" I said. "And be thankful you're getting off so easily!"

He paid no attention to me. "I must see her," he muttered.

"What do you expect to gain by bluffing now?" I said impatiently. "You must see that the game is up."

"I will not leave here without seeing her," he said with a kind of dull obstinacy.

"You have me at a disadvantage," I said bitterly. "You know I can't have you thrown out without causing a scandal."

He scarcely seemed to hear me. "I will go when she sends me," he muttered.

"All right, my patience is equal to yours," I said.

So there we sat, he with his ghastly white face turned towards the door into the inner rooms, moistening his lips from time to time, I looking out of the window.

To make matters worse, Mrs. Bleecker came clucking in. She, knowing nothing, fell on Quarles' neck, so to speak, and told him all her troubles with sidelong shots at me.

He paid little attention to her vapouring, only repeating in his ghastly, blank way: "I must see Irma."

"Of course!" said Mrs. Bleecker. "I'll tell her you're here."

"Mrs. Bleecker, as a friend, I advise you not to interfere," I said sternly.

She went out, flouncing her skirts at me.

To my surprise, Miss Hamerton presently came in. I cannot say what led her to do it, perhaps she was hoping against hope that he could defend himself. There was no sign of weakness in her now. Her face was as composed as marble. Mrs. Bleecker did not return.

"Irma," he cried, "send this fellow away."

I made haste to go, but she kept me. "Mr. Enderby must stay," she said. "He is your friend," she added.

He made a gesture of despair. A hideous silence descended on the three of us.

"You asked to see me," she said at last.

"Irma, do you believe this of me?" he cried like a soul out of Hell.

"I am willing to hear anything you have to say," she murmured.

"What does evidence matter?" he cried. "Do you believe me capable of such a thing?"

"Am I not forced to?" she said very low.

His head dropped. I never saw such hopeless wretchedness in a man's face. I felt like an executioner.

"Speak up!" I said sharply. "We are anxious to believe in you."

He shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he said in a stifled voice. "I doubt if I could clear myself. Anyway I shan't try. It—it is killed!"

He bent a look of fathomless reproach on her. "Good-bye, Irma," he said quietly. "I'm glad I was the means of your getting your jewels back. I never knew they had been stolen."

This to me was the purest exhibition of cheek I had ever met with. I was hard put to it to keep my hands off the man. If she had not been there! He went. And when I turned around Irma had gone back into the next room. I was angry through and through, and yet—and yet——! A nagging little doubt teased me.

So ended, as I thought, the case of the blue pearls. Little did I suspect what was on the way.

10

The following day was a blue one for me. Deprived of all the exciting activities of the past few weeks I was at a loss what to do with myself. Moreover, I was dissatisfied with the result of those activities. I had won out, so to speak, but my client had not. For her only tragic unhappiness had come of it. Meanwhile that little inner voice continued to whisper that I had not got to the bottom of the case. I could not put that young fellow's amazed and despairing face out of my mind. It did not fit into the theory of his guilt. On top of it all I had had a quarrel with Sadie the night before.

About noon my uncomfortable thoughts were broken into by the entrance of Sadie herself with storm signals flying, to wit: a pair of flashing blue eyes and a red flag hoisted in either cheek. I had supposed that she was already on the way to Amityville with Miss Hamerton, where they were to stay at a sanatorium conducted by a doctor friend of mine.

Before I could speak she exploded like a bomb in my office. "Ben, you've been a fool!"

"Eh?" I said, blinking and looking precious like one, I expect.

She repeated it with amplifications.

"So you said last night," I remarked.

"But I hadn't seen her then."

"Aren't you going to the country?" I asked, hoping to create a diversion.

"Yes, at two o'clock. But I had to see you first."

"To tell me what you thought of me?"

"To beg you to do something."

"What is there to do?"

"You have made a hideous mistake! Ruined both their lives!"

I may have had my own doubts, but it wouldn't have been human to confess them in the face of an attack like this. "Easy, there!" I said sulkily. "Have you discovered any new evidence?"

"Oh, evidence!" she cried scornfully. "I know he couldn't have stolen her pearls, and in your heart you know it, too."

"Sorry," I said sarcastically, "but in conducting my business I have to consult my head before my heart."

"I know it!" she said bitterly. "That's why you've been a fool!"

"Well, next time I'll consult a clairvoyant."

"Oh, don't try to be clever! It's too dreadful! If you had seen her! She will never act again. And he!—he will likely kill himself, if he has not already done it."

This struck a chill to my breast. Sadie had an intuitive sense that I could not afford to despise. At the same time having been called a fool, I couldn't back down.

"I don't see what better he can do," I said hardily.

"You can say that!" she said aghast. "You don't mean it!"

A very real jealousy made me hot. That handsome young blackguard had all the women with him. "Are you in love with him, too?" I asked sarcastically.

It was a mistake. She had me there. "You're doing your best to make me," she retorted.

"What are you abusing me for?" I complained. "I did no more than what I was engaged to do."

"She was distracted!" said Sadie. "She couldn't think for herself. She depended on you."

"Well, I did the best I could for her," I said doggedly. "You seem to think that I enjoyed doing it. There is a perfect case against him."

"There is not!" she said quickly. "Your own evidence that you set such a store by is full of holes!"

I invited her to point them out.

"One of your points against him is that he lately came into possession of a lot of money, presumably the proceeds of the theft. Yet you found the pearls on him, too. One fact contradicts the other."

"How do I know what other activities he's been engaged in?"

"You do not believe that."

"I beg your pardon," I said stiffly. "Permit me to know my own beliefs."

"If it wasn't true it wouldn't anger you."

"I am not angry." I smiled to prove it.

"How can I talk to you if you act like such a child!" cried Sadie.

"Never mind my actions. Stick to his."

"You know very well that he could not have carried out several successful robberies without a lot of experience. His whole open life gives the lie to that. Have we not gone into every part of it?"

"I know I found the pearls on him," I said doggedly. "They could not very well have been planted in a locked drawer in his own safe. He did not even claim that they were."

She ignored this. "And that cryptogram," she went on, "I mean the first one. It didn't say so in so many words, but the inference was unmistakable that Miss Hamerton's pearls had been disposed of, and that part of the proceeds was waiting for the thief. How do you account for that?"

I did not try to account for it. I pooh-poohed it. "He convicted himself," I insisted. "We invited him, we begged him to explain. He could not."

"Would not, you mean."

"What's the difference?"

She favoured me with an extraordinary glance of scorn. "And you set up to understand human nature!"

"Well, let me have your understanding of it," I said sarcastically.

"He was in love with her," said Sadie. "I suppose you don't question that."

"No, strange as it seems, I believe he was in love with her."

"That makes goose eggs of all your fine reasoning! Reason all night and it wouldn't make sense. He might have stolen anybody else's pearls but never hers. It was she who wronged love in believing that he could. To find out that she suspected him killed his love dead. Losing that, what did he care about his reputation? If he does away with himself it will be not because he was accused of a theft, but because she killed his trust in her, and he doesn't care to live without it."

I listened to all this with an affected smile of superiority, but it reached me. Every word that the unhappy Quarles had uttered fitted in with Sadie's theory.

"Suppose some one accused you of stealing Miss Hamerton's purse to buy me a present," she went on, artfully changing her tone. "I would make a tremendous virtuous fuss, of course, but in my heart I couldn't love you any less, though you might not have the sense to know it. But if they said you had stolen my purse to buy me something, how I would laugh! It's too silly for words."

I was rapidly weakening, but it was damnably hard to own up.

"The same with this case. You think I'm in love with Quarles because I defend him. That's just like a man! The truth is, what hurts me is to see you deceive yourself, and then look fatuous about it."

She was now wielding a double-edged sword. "But if the woman who loves him was deceived, surely I have some excuse," I said meekly.

"That's the weakness of her character—or the penalty of her position, whichever you like. She is so surrounded by flattery and meanness, it has taught her to suspect even her lover."

"But how did the pearls get in his safe?" I cried, begging for mercy.

"I don't know. It's a mystery. I'm only trying to show you that you haven't solved the mystery yet." Once more she changed her tone, the witch! "I'm so keen to have you make a great success of the case, Ben. And to help a little."

That completed the rout of my forces. "Sadie, darling," I cried. "In my heart I feel the same as you. I would have given in at once if you hadn't begun by slapping my face!"

There was a little private interlude here. Boss and operative were lost sight of.

"Now let's get to work!" I said.

"I hope it's not too late!" she said sadly.

11

I hastened down to Quarles' rooms near Gramercy Square. I found his old housekeeper in tears. My glimpse beyond her showed me that the place was partly dismantled. I found that she was half-heartedly packing. She did not know me without my Faxon makeup, and refused any information. I suspected that she had been forbidden to speak. However, by adroit and sympathetic questioning, and because the poor old soul was bursting with her troubles, it finally came out with a rush. She thought her master had lost his mind, he had acted so strangely, but such was her awe of him, she had not dared question his commands.

All night long he had paced his bedroom and sitting-room, pausing only to burn papers and cherished mementos in the grate. When she had risen from her bed and timidly enquired if he were ill, he had harshly ordered her back to her room. There she had lain trembling until morning, grieving because she thought she had offended him.

He had left his breakfast untasted. Afterwards he had called her to him, and in a voice and manner totally unlike his own, had announced that he was going away, and had given her instructions that terrified her. His furniture was to be sent to an auctioneer's under an assumed name, and was to be put up on the first sale day. She was to keep what it brought in lieu of wages. His clothes were to be sent to the Salvation Army. His jewelry and knick-knacks she might sell or keep as she chose. On second thoughts he had written out his instructions in the form of a letter to her in case any of her acts should be questioned. He had then called a taxi from the stable he usually patronised, and had departed without any baggage. This last fact alarmed her more than all the rest.

All this read fatally clear. I was careful, however, to make light of it to the grief-stricken old woman. I assumed an authority which she willingly deferred to. I ordered her to put the rooms in order, and not to make any other move until she heard from me again. She was vastly cheered. What she dwelt on most tragically was the necessity of sending all his beautiful suits to the ragged crew who profited by the Salvation Army's benefactions.

I found out from the taxi stable that Quarles had been driven to the Pennsylvania station. I got hold of his driver, a man frequently employed by him. He had remarked his strange appearance this morning. On reaching the station Quarles had asked the porter who opened the cab door what time the next train left for Baltimore. On learning that he had but three minutes to catch it, he had thrust a bill in the chauffeur's hand, and rushed away. This had been at ten o'clock; it was now nearly one. I had the same driver carry me to the station, where I telephoned Sadie, snatched a bite to eat, and caught the next express South.

It was not the most cheerful journey I have taken. I had four hours to think over the tragic possibilities of my mistake, and it was small comfort to reflect that it was a natural mistake. Quarles, with his three hours' start had only too much time to put his purpose into effect. My only hope was that he might instinctively be led to wait until night. Darkness has an invincible attraction for desperate souls.

Arriving in Baltimore I had the whole wide city to choose from, and not a clue. No chance of anybody's having marked him in the crowd that left the train there. However, I happened to know of a certain select hotel invariably patronised by the elite of the profession, and I went there on a chance. The clerk I saw did not know Mr. Quarles, but upon my describing him he said that such a young man had been in the hotel during the afternoon. He was not registered there. He recollected him because he had stopped at the desk to ask an unusual question. Did the clerk know where there was a taxidermist in town? Together they had looked up an address in the business directory, and the young man had departed. He had not returned.

I hastened to the taxidermist's wondering greatly what could have been Quarles' errand in such a place. Casting back in my mind, I remembered having seen several little cases of mounted butterflies among his treasures. There was something pathetically innocent in the wide open trail the young fellow was leaving behind him. This surely was no experienced criminal.

The store was kept by a benignant old man who somehow seemed to belong with the stuffed birds and pet dogs that lined the walls of his little place. I also saw many little frames of impaled beetles and butterflies such as I had seen in Quarles' rooms. The entire place had an old world look.

The old fellow was a kindly, garrulous soul who required not the slightest pressure to set him talking. Quarles, it appeared, had made quite an impression on him. "A handsome young fellow!" he said, "and such a gentleman." Quarles, he said, had been attracted into his shop by the butterflies, and they had fallen into talk about butterfly hunting, of which sport both were devotees. Quarles had finally purchased three beautiful specimens of something with a terrible Latin name.

As he was about to leave, Quarles had remarked that he was on his way out of town for a jaunt, and he had neglected to provide himself with any cyanide. It seems that cyanide is what they use to kill the insects. In all innocence the old man had furnished it, and his customer with one more question had departed. Where was there a second hand clothes dealer?

Cyanide of potassium, deadliest of poisons! I hastened to the second hand store with a sickness at the heart.

They remembered Quarles here, too. The story he had told here was that he wanted some worn old clothes to wear to a masquerade. He had been furnished with a complete outfit, hat, suit, shirt, socks and shoes. While things were being wrapped up, he had mentioned idly that he was a stranger in town, and he had a couple of hours to kill. He wanted to know of a trolley line that would take him out in the country. The storekeeper had recommended the Annapolis short line as the pleasantest ride on a mild evening.

This had been about four, and it was now a little after six. I had caught up on him a little, I found that the cars left for Annapolis every half hour. By good luck the car which had left at four returned while I was waiting in the station. I interviewed the conductor. He remembered Quarles. His attention had been attracted to him because, although he held a ticket to Annapolis, he had suddenly risen and left the car at the Severn river bridge station. I took the six-thirty car for Annapolis. The conductor told me that the station at the bridge was used principally by summer residents who had their motor boats meet them here. At this season, early in May, there was but little business there. It was almost dark when I got off, a balmy, Spring evening. It was a lonely-looking spot. There was a little settlement up a hill, with a path from the station, but I guessed that if my man had been attracted by the loneliness of the situation, he would not go that way. I looked about. Crossing the track and climbing down to a deserted strip of beach beside the wide river, I found with my flashlight that a solitary person had gone that way before me. He was wearing a shapely shoe. This would surely be he. The tracks drew me along beside the river towards its mouth, which was in view. On the other side, farther down, sparkled the lights of the Naval Academy.

Rounding a point, in a little cove hidden from the world, I found the remains of a fire on the sand. The embers were still glowing. Poking among them I found scraps of scorched felt and woollen cloth and bits of broken glass. Here obviously, Quarles had changed his clothes, and had destroyed the expensive garments he wore to the scene. Evidently he was counting on the fact that there is little trouble taken to establish the identity of a poorly dressed suicide. The glass was no doubt what remained of the case of butterflies he had bought. Some coins in the ashes added their mute testimony of his desperate intention.

I hurried on. The footprints recommenced beyond the fire, their shape somewhat altered, for he had changed his shoes with the rest. His fine shoes he must have filled with stones and thrown in the river for I found no remains of leather in the fire. I hoped that with the time he had spent doing all this he would now be but a short distance ahead of me. Unfortunately half a minute—half of that, would be enough for him to accomplish his purpose.

I came to the main road from Baltimore to Annapolis which crosses the Severn by another long bridge. Automobiles crossed it at intervals. Since the footprints were not resumed in the sand across the road it was clear he had turned into it one way or the other. The river seemed likeliest. I started out on the bridge, dreading most of all to hear a splash just out of my reach. It was now quite dark.

Out in the middle of the bridge close to the draw I came upon a motionless, slouching figure with battered hat pulled down over the face. Notwithstanding the shapeless clothes the tall slenderness was unmistakable. He was leaning with his elbows on the guard rail regarding something that he held in one hand. The object caught a spark from the red light of the draw overhead. It was the vial of cyanide. My heart bounded with relief. I was in time—but barely.

"Quarles," I said softly.

He straightened up with a terrified hissing intake of the breath. I turned the flashlight on myself to save lengthy explanations.

"You!" he said after a moment, in a low bitter tone. "God! must you dog me here!"

"I am your friend," I said.

He laughed. "Friend!" he said. "That's good!" Then his tone changed. "You'd better be on your way," he said threateningly. "I'm in no mood for fooling."

"I've been trying to overtake you since noon," I said, merely to be saying something. An instinct told me there was nothing like a little conversation to let down a desperate man.

"Why, in God's name?" he demanded. "What good am I to you now?"

"I no longer believe you guilty."

"I don't give a damn what you believe."

"I want you to help me find the thief."

"It's nothing to me who took the pearls. She's got 'em back again. You'd better go on. I won't stand for any interference."

"You won't do it now," I said confidently.

"Won't I!"

He made a move to uncork the little vial. I struck his wrist and it fell to the ground. We searched for it frantically in the dark. I had the light, and I saw it first. I put my heel on it, and ground the fragile, deadly thing into the planks of the bridge floor. He cursed me.

"There is still the water," I said.

"I'm a swimmer," he said sullenly. "I couldn't go down. I meant to climb on the rail and take the stuff, so it would look like drowning. But there are plenty of ways."

"Be a man and live!" I said.

He laughed again. "There's nothing in that cant for a man who's sick of the game."

"Live for her sake," I hazarded. "She loves you."

"You've mistaken your job, old man," he said with grim amusement. "You ought to be a playwright. Write her a play. She's a great actress. Yah! I'm sick of it! Love! There's no such thing. Not in women! This is real, anyhow."

I had got him talking. Something told me the crisis was past. I took a new tack.

"She certainly has treated you badly," I said. "I don't wonder you're sore. I know just how you feel."

He turned on me with clenched fist and a furious command to be silent. "It's no damned policeman's business what I feel!"

"Revenge is sweet," I murmured.

It brought him up all standing. In the dark I heard him breathing quickly.

"Do you want to crawl away like a cur and die in a hole?" I asked.

"Why in Hell can't you let me alone?" he said fretfully. "What do you want to drag me back for?"

I saw I had him going now. "Make her suffer," I urged. "The most perfect revenge in the world is yours if you want it, because she loves you."

"What are you getting at?"

"Prove your innocence to her."

"I doubt if I could," he said weakly. "I shouldn't know how to begin. I seem to be caught in a net."

"I am offering to help you."

"What's your game?" he demanded suspiciously.

"I've made a serious mistake," I said. "I've got my professional reputation to think of. Besides, I'm only human. I don't want to have your untimely end on my conscience."

"It needn't be. I'm my own master."

I decided to risk all on one throw. I laid a hand on his shoulder. "Look here," I said frankly. "You and I are not strangers. We took to each other from the first, though I happened to be wearing a disguise. I have suffered like the devil all day. Forgive me my part in yesterday's affair, and be my friend. Friendship isn't such a common thing in spite of all the talk about it. I should think you'd recognise the real thing when it's offered to you."

"Rubbish!" he grumbled. "I don't believe in friendship. I never had a real friend." But he didn't shake my hand off.

"Try me."

"Oh well, you've spoiled it for to-night, anyway. I'll listen to what you've got to say. Where can we go? I haven't a cent. And nothing but these filthy rags."

"That's a trifle," I said joyfully. "I'll find a place."

12

We proceeded on across the bridge into the town of Annapolis. First I took Roland to a lunch room and commanded him to eat. I had a time getting him to swallow the first mouthful, but that once down, he developed a ravenous appetite. I suppose he had not eaten in thirty hours. It was comical to see how, with a stomachful of hot food inside him, a zest in living renewed itself. The more his resolution weakened, the louder he inveighed against life. But he had a sense of humour. He suddenly became conscious of the absurdity of his attitude, and we laughed together. From that moment he was safe, and he was mine. There is nothing to cement a friendship like laughter.

Afterwards I got a room in an obscure hotel. Roland sat down on the edge of the bed, and proceeded to give me his version of the matters that perplexed me so. In the middle of a sentence he fell over and slept like a dead man. I stole out and telegraphed Sadie at Amityville that I had him safe and sound. Returning, I sat by the hour watching him. My heart was soft for the human creature I had snatched from the brink. He looked very boyish and appealing as he lay sleeping. He seemed years younger than I. I cannot tell you how glad I was to think that there was warmth in the young body, and sentience under the shut lids.

Shortly after midnight he awoke as suddenly and thoroughly as he had fallen asleep. Then he wanted to talk. He was bursting with talk. I swallowed my yawns and set myself to listen. I let him talk in his own way, no questions. For a long time I listened to what I already knew, the tale of his jealous, hopeless passion for Irma. Sometimes he had suspected that she inclined towards him, but it seemed preposterous to ask her to give up her profession for him. On the other hand he knew he could not endure sharing his wife with the public. He had decided to go away without speaking—and then the miraculous legacy had dropped from the skies.

"Tell me all about that," I commanded.

"I promised not to tell," he said reluctantly.

"This is a matter of life and death. Why was a promise exacted?"

"To avoid publicity."

"There will be none," I said. "I pledge myself to guard the secret as well as you could."

"I destroyed the letter I got, with the others," he said. "But I read it so often I can give it to you almost word for word."

"Too bad it was destroyed!" I said.

"Oh, you can verify the contents by the Amsterdam Trust Company who paid me the money."

"But if you have a clear case what did you run for?" I asked amazed.

"You will never understand," he said with a wry smile. "I seemed to die at that moment when I saw that Irma believed I was capable of robbing her. What did I care about my case?"

Hearing that, my opinion of Sadie's perspicacity went up marvellously. "Go on," I said.

I took down the letter from his dictation. It was written, he said, on expensive note-paper, without address, crest or seal, in a large and somewhat old-fashioned feminine hand.

"DEAR MR. QUARLES:

Although you have never heard of me I think of you as my dearest friend. I have followed your career from the time of your first appearance on the stage. I am one of those unfortunates who, condemned to live, are cut off from life. I watch life pass from behind my iron screen. It is you who, all unconscious, have supplied me with a dream to cheat my emptiness. I have warmed my cold hands at your fire.

"Now they tell me my release is at hand. I wish to show my gratitude to you in the only way that is possible to me. An artist's career is difficult and uncertain. I want to remove a little of the uncertainty from yours.

"I must avoid giving rise to silly gossip which would grieve my relatives. To avoid the publicity of probate I am making secret arrangements beforehand. An old friend will carry out my wishes for me when I am gone.

"The doctors give me a week longer. Upon my death this letter will be mailed to you. You will then hear from the Amsterdam Trust Company that a sum of money awaits your order. You will never know my name. But if you should let even the bare facts become known, some busybody would eventually connect them with my name, and unhappy gossip result. Therefore I ask you as a man of honour to keep the whole transaction locked in your breast."

"That is all," said Roland. "It was signed: 'Your grateful friend.'"

"Did you look in the recent obituaries for a clue?" I asked.

"Yes," he confessed. "There was none."

"Go ahead with your story. We'll return to the letter later."

"At first I thought it was a hoax," he resumed, "but sure enough, in two or three days I received a letter from the Trust Company asking me to call. I saw the President. He said that the sum of forty thousand dollars had been deposited with them to be turned over to me in cash. He said it had been bequeathed to me by one who desired to remain unknown. He said he did not know himself who my benefactor was. He had dealt with a lawyer. He said that there was but one condition attached to the legacy, namely that I give my word never to speak of the matter. I had met this Mr. Ambler the president, and he had seen me act, so there was no difficulty about identifying me. I left his office carrying the money, and carried it to my own bank to deposit. That is all there is to that."

"Good!" I said. "The Amsterdam Trust Company is a solid institution, and the president a well-known man. They will still be there if we need them."

"It mustn't get in the newspapers," he said nervously.

"Trust me for that. I'm not going to make you break your word. Now about the bet you made with Miss Hamerton."

He winced at the sound of her name. "There's no more in that than appears on the surface," he said irritably. "I couldn't have told the paste from the genuine. I wanted to give her a box of gloves. But she never claimed them, and I forgot about it."

"The cryptogram you have already explained," said I.

"I did not know there was such a paper in my pocket."

"Hold on," he cried suddenly, "about that bet. I have just remembered that I once had a talk about precious stones, pearls, with a man in the company."

"Milbourne?"

"Sure! How did you know?"

"I believe he took them. But it's going to be a job to prove it."

"It was just a trifling conversation," Roland resumed, thinking hard. "I can't remember exactly. He marked the beauty and oddity of Ir—of Miss Hamerton's necklace. I think he said he hoped that she did not risk wearing real pearls on the stage. That may have been to find out if I knew they were artificial. I told him she did not wear the real ones. There was more talk. He seemed to know about pearls, and I believe I asked him how to tell the real from the artificial. I never thought of it then, but looking back I see that it may have been that talk which gave me the idea of making a bet with Ir—with her. Oh, I have been a fool!"

"This is all interesting," I said, "but it doesn't give us anything solid to go on. Now for the main thing. How did the real pearls get in your safe?"

Roland struck his forehead. "I have been everybody's dupe!" he groaned.

"It's a part we all have to play occasionally," I said soothingly. "Go ahead."

"About this time I began to get circular letters from a firm of jewellers called Jones and Sanford with an address on Maiden Lane, where all the jewellers used to be. They were fac-simile letters, very well written."

"The kind that are made to look like personal letters, but like false teeth, deceive nobody?"

"Precisely. I got one every few days. They were all to the effect that the writers as brokers, were prepared to sell precious stones at prices much under those asked by the big jewellers. There was a lot of rigmarole about saving on overhead charges, interest on valuable stocks and so on, about what you would expect in such letters. There were a lot of imposing-looking references, too."

"At first I paid no attention to the letters; precious stones didn't interest me. But when I got all that money I began to read them. You see I—I wanted to make Irma a present, and I knew she loved pearls better than anything else in the world."

I let a whistle of astonishment out of me. "Do you mean to say you bought Miss Hamerton's pearls with the idea of presenting her with them, to add to her collection?"

He nodded shamefacedly. "I didn't know she had been robbed."

"How long had you had them?"

"Just a few days."

He told me that he had asked Miss Hamerton to marry him, and intended the necklace for a wedding-gift if she consented.

"You were a downy bird!" I exclaimed.

"Wait till I tell you," he said. "They were a slick pair. You might have been taken in yourself."

"Did they know you?" I asked, still full of amazement.

"Certainly. I paid for them by check, certified check."

"Which they cashed within half an hour!"

"Maybe. I never enquired."

"Sold Miss Hamerton's pearls back to Miss Hamerton's leading man!" I cried. "My boy, we have something out of the common in crooks to deal with!"

"They had a well-furnished suite on an upper floor of a first-class office building," he resumed. "I was there three or four times. I saw other customers coming and going. Everything was business-like and all right looking. Even the stenographer had a prim New England air. They showed me all kinds of precious stones. I bit at the pearls because I recognised that they were the same kind Irma had. They asked eight thousand dollars for them."

"You knew, didn't you, that Miss Hamerton's necklace was worth much more than that?"

"Yes. But I had been told hers were very fine and perfect. I supposed these to be not so good."

"And so you paid your money on a chance, and took them home."

"Not quite as fast as that. The jewellers seemed to take it as a matter of course that I would have the pearls examined by an expert before purchasing. They suggested that I take them up to Dunsany's."

"Dunsany's?" I said amazed.

"Yes. Wasn't that enough to lull suspicion? Dunsany's is more than a jewelry store; it's a national institution."

"But you never took them there?"

"Indeed I did," was the surprising answer. "Sanford and Jones' clerk went with me. We saw Mr. Freer, the firm's expert on pearls."

I whistled again. Freer, the man at Dunsany's to whom I had told my little fiction of the fiction-writer, and who had looked so queer when I mentioned blue pearls!

"Large gentleman, elegantly-dressed, with a face like a boiled dumpling?"

"Sure!" cried Roland. "Do you know him, too?"

"Go on with your story!" I said.

"Mr. Freer examined the pearls and told me they were genuine, and of good quality. He valued them at about twelve thousand dollars."

"The devil he did!" I cried. "This case is spreading wider and wider. Freer is in the gang, too. To think of their having a picket in Dunsany's!"

"How do you know?"

"Because he like everybody else in the trade had been informed that the only necklace of blue-black pearls in the world had been stolen. He knew, moreover, that it was worth——" But here prudence stopped my tongue.

"Worth what?" asked Roland.

"Well, much more than twelve thousand."

"The only blue pearls in the world?" he said, puzzled.

"There's a lot about this necklace you don't know," I said smiling. "All in good time. Go on with your story."

"Well, that's all, isn't it?" said he. "At least you know the rest. Why these fellows were so careful of details, you will even find their imprint in gold inside the case. Jones and Sanford, such and such a number, Maiden Lane."

"Hm! I have a case on my hands now!" I said meditatively. "It may take me six months or more to clean this up."

"I'll work with you," he said.

"My dear fellow, I like you better every minute," I said, smiling at him. "But you'd make the worst detective in the world."

"Oh, well, maybe I would," he said.

"There's no need for you to await the outcome of the case," I said. "We have the evidence right in hand to clear you. I'll lay it before Miss Hamerton to-morrow morning."

My young friend surprised me again. He leaped up with his dark eyes positively blazing. "You'll do nothing of the kind!" he cried passionately. "That affair is done, done for ever. If you interfere, I won't be responsible for the consequences. She has her pearls back. Let her be. My time will come when she reads of the capture and the trial of the real thieves in the public newspapers!"

13

Back in New York next day, I made haste to get to work on the half dozen clues with which Roland had furnished me.

I may say in passing, though the visit had no important results, that I called on Mr. Ambler of the Amsterdam Trust Company. At first he declined to give me any information whatever, but when I hinted that a certain suspicion rested on Mr. Quarles, he corroborated Roland's story as far as he knew it. He declined to give me the name of the attorney who had brought the money to the bank. "My endorsement of Mr. Quarles' story should be amply sufficient to clear him," he said, with the air of a bank president.

"Undoubtedly," I said, bowing, and left.

Since there appeared to be no immediate connection between Roland's legacy and the theft of the pearls, I let that go for the present.

I went to the address of the jewellers on Maiden Lane, but found, as I expected, that the birds had flown. An irate renting agent aired his opinion of Messrs. Sanford and Jones, but could give me no information of their whereabouts. They had leased the offices for a year, and after five weeks' tenancy, quietly moved out.

"Don't you ask references from prospective tenants?" I asked.

"They gave A1 references," he mourned.

I took down the names of their references for future use. One of them was Mr. Freer of Dunsany and Company.

My next call was upon Mr. Alfred Mount in his office behind the store of exquisite fashion. His greeting, while polite, was slightly cooler than of yore. As a man of the world, I was expected to gather from it, that our relations were now at an end. It warned me to be wary. I was already on my guard, because I knew that he hated Roland, and hoped to profit by his disgrace.

"Anything new?" he asked casually.

"Yes—and no," I said. "I am not satisfied that we have got quite to the bottom of our case."

"Do we ever get quite to the bottom of anything?" he asked.

"I do not believe that Quarles was alone in this," I said as a feeler.

"What makes you think so?" he asked quickly.

"Nothing definite," I said. "Just a feeling."

He shrugged.

"I believe that expert jewel thieves made a fool of him," I suggested.

"It is possible," said Mount, looking bored.

"If so, it is much to the interest of your business to run them down. So I have come to ask for your co-operation."

"My dear sir," Mount replied with his indulgent, worldly smile, "the world is full of trouble. I do not try to escape my share; I face it like a man, or as near like a man as I can. But I never go searching for more. We have by your skill recovered the jewels. The reasons for not pursuing the matter any further are to me obvious. Better let well enough alone."

I appeared to give in to him. "Maybe you're right. I thought I saw a chance to earn a little glory."

"There will be plenty of opportunities for that," he said affably. "You can count on me."

We parted in friendly fashion.

So much for Mr. Alfred Mount. At least he would never be able to say later that I had not given him his chance.

I went to the magnificent marble building which houses Dunsany and Company, and asked boldly for Mr. Walter Dunsany, great-grandson of the founder of the house, and its present head. I was admitted to him without difficulty. I found him a jeweller and a man of affairs of a type very different from him I had just come from. Mr. Dunsany was a simple, unassuming man, direct and outspoken. In short, a man's man. I was strongly attracted to him, and I may say without vanity that he seemed to like me. From the first he trusted me more than I had any right to expect.

At this time he was a man of about forty-five years old, somewhat bald, and beginning to be corpulent, but with a humorous, eager, youthful glance. He glanced up from my card with a whimsical smile.

"Confidential investigator? More trouble, I suppose?"