I
could have had it ten days ago for half a sovereign, or probably five
shillings. I wish now I had bought it; then I could have sold it to
you.'

"It seemed that a sailor had been hawking the pendant round the harbour,
and had been on board the yacht with it.

"'Deuced anxious the beggar was to get rid of it, too,' said Halliwell,
grinning at the recollection. 'Swore it was a genuine pearl of priceless
value, and was willing to deprive himself of it for the trifling sum of
half a jimmy. But we'd heard that sort of thing before. However, the
curio-man seems to have speculated on the chance of meeting with a
greenhorn, and he seems to have pulled it off. Lucky curio man!'

"I listened patiently to their gibes, and when they had talked
themselves out I told them about the jeweller. They were most
frightfully sick; and when we had taken the pendant to a dealer in gems
who happened to be staying in the town, and he had offered me five
hundred pounds for it, their language wasn't fit for a divinity
students' debating club. Naturally the story got noised abroad, and when
I left, it was the talk of the place. The general opinion was that the
sailor, who was traced to a tea-ship that had put into the harbour, had
stolen it from some Chinese passenger; and no less than seventeen
different Chinamen came forward to claim it as their stolen property.

"Soon after this I returned to England, and, as my nerves were still in
a very shaky state, I came to live with my cousin Alfred, who has a
large house at Weybridge. At this time he had a friend staying with him,
a certain Captain Raggerton, and the two men appeared to be on very
intimate terms. I did not take to Raggerton at all. He was a
good-looking man, pleasant in his manners, and remarkably plausible. But
the fact is--I am speaking in strict confidence, of course--he was a bad
egg. He had been in the Guards, and I don't quite know why he left; but
I do know that he played bridge and baccarat pretty heavily at several
clubs, and that he had a reputation for being a rather uncomfortably
lucky player. He did a good deal at the race-meetings, too, and was in
general such an obvious undesirable that I could never understand my
cousin's intimacy with him, though I must say that Alfred's habits had
changed somewhat for the worse since I had left England.

"The fame of my purchase seems to have preceded me, for when, one day, I
produced the pendant to show them, I found that they k