o
when he spoke again his voice was gentler, and Esther's courage leaped
to meet it.

"I am told the necklace was in your bag. How did it get there?"

"I don't know," said Esther, in a perfect clarity.

His new formed hope crumbled. He could hear inexorably, like a counter
cry, Lydia's voice, saying, "She stole it." Had Esther stolen it? But
Esther did not know Lydia had said it, or that it had ever been said to
him at all, and she was daring more than she would have dared if she had
known of that antagonist.

"It is a plot between them," she said boldly.

"Between whom?"

"Aunt Patricia and him."

"What is the plot?"

"I don't know."

"If you think there was a plot, you must have made up your mind what the
plot was and what they were to gain by it. What do you believe the plot
to have been?"

This was all very stupid, Esther felt, when he might be assuring her of
his unchanged and practical devotion.

"Oh, I don't know," she said irritably. "How should I know?"

"You wouldn't think there was a plot without having some idea of what it
was," he was insisting, in what she thought his stupid way. "What is
your idea it was?"

This was really, she saw, the same question over again, which was
another instance of his heavy literalness. She had to answer, she knew
now, unless she was to dismiss him, disaffected.

"She put the necklace in my bag," she ventured, with uncertainty as to
the value of the statement and yet no diminution of boldness in making
it.

"What for?"

"To have him steal it, I suppose."

"To have him steal her own necklace? Couldn't she have given it to him?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Esther. "She is half crazy. Don't you see she
is? She might have had a hundred reasons. She might have thought if he
tried to steal it he'd get caught, and she could blackmail him."

"But how was he to know she had put it in the bag?"

"I don't know." Esther was settling into the stolidity of the obstinate
when they are crowded too far; yet she still remembered she must not
cease to be engaging.

"Why was it better to have him find it in your bag than anywhere else in
the house?" he was hammering on.

"I don't know," said Esther again, and now she gave a little sigh.

That, she thought, should have recalled him to his male responsibility
not to trap and torture. But she had begun to wonder how she could
escape when the door opened and Jeff came in. Alston turned to meet him,
and, with Esther, was a