ecover the property which some one of the people under your charge
has robbed me of!"

"I'll accompany you to your cabin," said the captain; and they went down
the steps.

I stood motionless, gaping like an idiot into the yawn of hatch down
which they had disappeared. I had been so used to think of the diamond
as cunningly hidden in the Major's berth, that his disclosure was
absolutely a shock with its weight of astonishment. Small wonder that
neither Captain North nor I had observed any marks of a workman's tools
in the Major's berth. Not but that it was a very ingenious stratagem,
far cleverer to my way of thinking than any subtle, secret burial of the
thing. To think of the Major and his two Indians sitting idly for hours
in that cabin, with the captain and myself all the while supposing they
were fashioning some wonderful contrivance or place for concealing the
treasure in! And still, for all the Major's cunning, the stone was gone!
Who had stolen it? The only fellow likely to prove the thief was the
steward, not because he was more or less of a rogue than any other man
in the ship, but because he was the one person who, by virtue of his
office, was privileged to go in and out of the sleeping places as his
duties required.

I was pacing the deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business
of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri's gift to the Queen of England, with all
sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the
central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the
captain returned. He was alone. He stepped up to me hastily, and said:--

"He swears the diamond has been stolen. He showed me the empty case."

"Was there ever a stone in it at all?" said I.

"I don't think that," he answered, quickly; "there's no motive under
Heaven to be imagined if the whole thing's a fabrication."

"What then, sir?"

"The case is empty, but I've not made up my mind yet that the stone's
missing."

"The man's an officer and a gentleman."

"I know, I know!" he interrupted, "but still, in my opinion, the stone's
not missing. The long and short of it is," he said, after a very short
pause, with a careful glance at the skylight and companion hatch, "his
behaviour isn't convincing enough. Something's wanting in his passion
and his vexation."

"Sincerity!"

"Ah! I don't intend that this business shall trouble me. He angrily
required me to search the ship for stowaways. Bosh! The second mate