shness. She indicated a chair conveniently opposite her own
and he sat down and at once began.

"Madame Beattie, I have come to talk over this unfortunate matter of the
necklace."

"Oh," said Madame Beattie, with a perfect affability and no apparent
emotion, "Anne French has been chattering to you."

"Naturally," said Choate. "I am their counsel, hers and her sister's."

"These aren't matters of law," said Madame Beattie. "They are very
interesting personal questions, and I advise you to let them alone. You
won't find any precedent for them in your books."

"I have been unpardonably slow in coming to you," said Alston. "And my
coming now hasn't so very much to do with Lydia and Anne. I might have
come just the same if you hadn't begun to annoy them."

"Well," said Madame Beattie impatiently. She wanted her nap, for she was
due that evening at street corners in Mill End. "Get to the point, if
you please."

"The point is," said Alston, "that some months ago when you began to
make things unpleasant for a number of persons--"

"Nonsense!" said Madame Beattie briskly. "I haven't made things
unpleasant. I've only waked this town out of its hundred years' sleep.
You'd better be thankful to me, all of you. Trade is better, politics
are most exciting, everything's different since I came."

"I sent at once to Paris," said Alston, with an impartial air of
conveying information they were equally interested in, "for the history
of the Beattie necklace. And I've got it. I've had it a week or more,
waiting to be used." He looked her full in the face to see how she took
it. He would have said she turned a shade more unhealthy, in a yellow
way, but not a nerve in her seemed to blench.

"Well," said she, "have you come to tell me the history of the Beattie
necklace?"

"Briefly," said Alston, "it was given the famous singer, as she states,
by a certain Royal Personage. We are not concerned with his identity,
his nationality even. But it was a historic necklace, and he'd no
business to give it to her at all. There were some rather shady
transactions before he could get his hands on it. And the Royal Family
never ceased trying to get it back. The Royal Personage was a young man
when he gave it to her, but by the time the family'd begun to exert
pressure he wasn't so impetuous, and he, too, wanted it back. His
marriage gave the right romantic reason, which he used. He actually
asked the famous singer to return it to him, and at