questions, young fellow,” was the good-humoured reply. “If you could only keep away from those cabaret shows, give Paris a rest for a time, and find some one like Félice, we’d see your wife had her diamond necklace all right.”
Philip, who was a smaller edition of his brother, bronzed, with clear blue eyes and a little ruddy moustache, shook his head disconsolately.
“It’s just because there isn’t another girl in the world like Félice,” he grumbled, “that I sometimes waste an hour or so at a cabaret, or fly over to Paris for a week-end. I’m beginning to believe in Eastern principles. No man who has such a treasure of a wife ought to exploit her to make other men jealous and envious.”
“I do so love your family, Andrew,” Félice murmured. “If only you had more brothers!”
“My dear,” her husband confided, “our rent roll wouldn’t stand it.”
“Talking about rent rolls,” Sir Richard intervened, “I was dining with the Chancellor of the Exchequer last night. He assures me that he has discovered a new way of taxing these vast inherited properties.”
“This,” Andrew declared, starting a second round with the cocktail shaker, “is the hour of peace. I am a man who has just lost a necklace worth thirty thousand pounds. My thoughts must be diverted.”
Sir Richard turned towards his neighbour.
“Did you ever see this wonderful necklace?” he asked.
“On the night it was stolen,” Charles replied. “Lady Glenlitten wore it for the earlier part of the evening. Then, unfortunately, as it chanced, she left us. I make enquiries often, and I read sometimes the English newspapers, but I imagine that the history of the great theft which followed remains to be written.”
“I read in one Sunday paper,” Philip remarked, “that the burglar who pinched it has got consumption. If the diamonds have to lie by until he comes out after he’s done his sentence, wreaths on his grave are the only good the necklace will be to him.”
“He will have a widow,” Sir Richard surmised. “They all have widows. I hope she pays her death duties, and the Crown will at least get something back.”
“It occurs to me,” their host complained, lighting a cigarette, “that you are all unnecessarily flippant about this subject. I am the bereaved person. I am not at all sure that the law will not compel me to make good the loss of this necklace for the benefit of my descendants.”
“Let me wave the torch of hope,” Sir Richard suggested. “I still maintain that the necklace will be traced. Every outlet for precious stone’s in Europe —and India for that matter—is being watched. No one will dare offer the more famous of the gems just yet. Your time may come, Andrew. As for my man, I simply don’t believe he’s got it. I have defended him three times before on various charges, and although of course he is a thief by instinct, whatever story he may put up elsewhere, he has always told me the truth.”
“The whole affair is very simple,” Philip declared. “If Sir Richard’s burglar hasn’t got the necklace, one of you fellows who were in the house at the time must have. Haslam has a guilty look about him, but I rather suspect Andrew. Have you put in your insurance claim yet, Andrew? Remember it’s a criminal affair if you’re found with the stuff afterwards.”
They were all intimates, chaffing without fear of misunderstanding. Even Haslam smiled grimly as he offered his bank book for inspection. Several courteous attempts were made to draw the Russian a little further into the circle. It was obvious that he only half understood the general tone. He drank cocktails with unfailing resolution, but the persistent badinage was beyond him. Lady Susan who had taken rather a fancy to the grave but somewhat disturbed-looking young man, led him through the folding doors into the library proper to show him some Russian treasures which had been brought home by her grandfather.
“A fine figure of a young man, that,” Sir Richard remarked thoughtfully, as he watched the two disappear. “I wonder how he got out of Russia.”
“He told me that night at Glenlitten,” Haslam confided, “that he had been taken prisoner early in the war by the Austrians. It was touch and go for the rest of the family, I believe.”
“Damned hard luck on some of these fellows!” the lawyer reflected. “I wonder whether he has anything to live on.”
“Well, one sees him about at places where the money is in evidence,” Philip commented.
“Your night haunts, I suppose you mean,” his brother suggested.
“I don’t see why you should saddle me with the shadow of your past dissipations,” Philip grumbled, “just because you have had the luck to marry the only girl worth marrying in the world. Still, the fellow is rather a frequenter of night clubs.”
“Why shouldn’t he be?” Andrew rejoined. “He makes a living out of it. He’s a professional dancer at the Legation—started last week.”
“Jolly plucky thing to do,” Philip approved. “If a fellow’s a good dancer and got no money, why on earth shouldn’t he make a bit at it?”
“Have you ever met him in what the journalists would call ‘Society’?” Sir Richard enquired.
“Not very often,” Philip admitted. “He’s got one or two pals who are rather a warm lot at cards, and I saw him once in a chemie dive.”
Andrew, who was walking around with the cocktail shaker, pointedly avoided his brother.
“Do you mean to say,” he asked sternly, “that you would run the risk of bringing disgrace upon our name by being discovered in such a place?”
“Only as Mr. Moses Brown,” Philip declared, holding out his glass wistfully. “And I assure you, Andrew, that every time I have been in a night club that has been raided, or on the one or two occasions when I have been in a chemie hold-up, it has been as Mr. Moses Brown.”
“The name is becoming familiar to me from the police sheets,” Sir Richard confided. “I shall give them a hint at Scotland Yard.”
Philip looked across at him in a hurt manner.
“And I thought that in the house of his friends, even the lawyer had a sense of humour,” he groaned. “This should be sanctuary. Thank you, Andrew,” he added, as his brother filled his still extended glass. “We must have an understanding with Sir Richard. This is the place and hour when I usually confess to a crime or two, but I can’t be myself if official notice is to be taken of my candour.”
“Awfully good thing for our dispositions,” Andrew suggested, “if for ten minutes every day we confessed our crimes and told the truth—had a heart-to-heart settling up with our consciences, as it were.”
“I should choose the ten minutes of solitude before slipping into my innocent couch,” Philip decided promptly.
“The most crowded ten minutes of your day, it would be,” his brother chuckled.
“Next time you stay at Glenlitten,” Félice warned him, “I shall come and listen.”
“Over my dead body,” her husband declared. “At any cost, child, you must be spared the knowledge of what human depravity can sink to.”
“Now is a good time for our ten minutes’ confession,” Sir Richard proposed suddenly. “Who pinched the Glenlitten necklace?”
“And whilst we’re about it,” Haslam put in with portentous unexpectedness, “who shot poor De Besset?”
A curious change seemed to flash into the atmosphere of the room. A few seconds before, its guiding spirit had been that of good-natured chaff. Personalities had been freely indulged in, every one had been entirely and completely at his ease. Now for some reason or other they had all become tongue-tied. An obvious embarrassment reigned. No one attempted a light-hearted reply, no one ventured upon a mock confession. Every one studied