cadilly."

"Very well."

Presently they were passing the Ritz. They got away from the houses on
that side. Now on their left were the tall railings that divided them
from the stretching spaces of the Park shrouded in the darkness and
mystery of night.

"Well, my girl, what are you after?" said Garstin, who never troubled
about the conventionalities, and seemed never to care what anyone
thought of him and his ways. "Go ahead. Let me have it. I'm not
coming in to your beastly hotel, you know. So get on with your bow wow
Dowager."

"So you remember that I had begun--"

"Of course I do."

"Do you ever miss anything--let anything escape you?"

"I don't know. Well, what is it?"

"I wanted to tell you something about Lady Sellingworth which has
puzzled me and a friend of mine. It is a sort of social mystery."

"Social! Oh, Lord!"

"Now, Dick, don't be a snob. You are a snob in your pretended hatred of
all decent people."

"D'you call your society dames decent?"

"Be quiet if you can! You're worse than a woman."

He did not say anything. His horsey profile looked hard and
expressionless in the night. As she glanced at it she could not help
thinking of Newmarket. He ought surely to have been a jockey with that
face and figure.

"You are listening?"

He said nothing. But he turned his face and she saw the two pin-points
of light. That was enough. She told him about the theft of Lady
Sellingworth's jewels, her neglect of all endeavour to recover them, her
immediate plunge into middle-age after the theft, and her avoidance of
general society ever since.

"What do you make of it?" she asked, when she had finished.

"Make of it?"

"Yes."

"Does your little mind find it mysterious?"

"Well, isn't it rather odd for a woman who loses fifty thousand pounds'
worth of jewels never to try to get them back?"

"Not if they were stolen by a lover."

"You think--"

"It's as obvious as that Martin, R.A., can't paint and I can."

"But I believe they were stolen at the _Gare du Nord_. Now does that
look like a lover?"

"I didn't say the _Gare du Nord_ looked like a lover."

"Don't be utterly ridiculous."

"I don't care where they were stolen--your old dowager's Gew-gaws.
Depend upon it they were stolen by some man she'd been mixed up with,
and she knew it, and didn't dare to prosecute. I can't see any mystery
in the matter."

"Perhaps you are right."

"Of course I am right."

Miss Van Tuyn said nothing f