rishing truth as an abstract duty. She was after results. He made a
thrust at random.

"I can't see your object in stirring up this matter. If you had any
ground of evidence you'd have made your claim and had it settled long
ago."

"Not fully," said Madame Beattie, fanning.

"Then you were paid something?"

"Something? How far do you think 'something' would go toward paying for
the loss of a diamond necklace? Evidently you don't know the history of
that necklace. If you were an older man you would. The papers were full
of it for years. It nearly caused a royal separation--they were
reconciled after--and I was nearly garroted once when the thieves
thought I had it in a hand-bag. There are historic necklaces and this is
one. Did you ever hear of Marie Antoinette's?"

"Yes," said Alston absently. He was thinking how to get at her in the
house where she lived. How would some of his novelists have written out
Madame Beattie and made her talk? "And Maupassant's." This he said
ruminatingly, but the lawyer in him here put down a mark. "Note," said
the mark, "Maupassant's necklace. She rose to that." There was no doubt
of it. A quick cross-light, like a shiver, had run across her eyes. "You
know Maupassant's story," he pursued.

"I know every word of Maupassant. Neat, very neat."

"You remember the wife lost the borrowed necklace, and she and her
husband ruined themselves to pay for it, and then they found it wasn't
diamonds at all, but paste."

"I remember," said Madame Beattie composedly. "But if it had been a
necklace such as mine an imitation would have cost a pretty penny."

"So it wasn't the necklace itself," he hazarded. "You wouldn't have
brought a priceless thing over here. It was the imitation."

Madame Beattie broke out, a shrill staccato, into something like anger.
But it might not have been anger, he knew, only a means of hostile
communication.

"You are a rude young man to put words into my mouth, a rude young man."

"I beg your pardon," said Alston. "But this is rather a serious matter.
And I do want to know, as a friend of Mrs. Jeffrey Blake."

"And counsel confided in by that imp," she supplied shrewdly.

"Yes, counsel retained by Miss Lydia French. I want to know whether you
had with you here in America the necklace given you by--" Here he
hesitated. He wondered whether, according to her standards, he was
unbearably insulting, or whether the names of royal givers could really
be mentioned.

"