, Lady Eustace?"

"I don't know what to think. Perhaps Mr. Camperdown did it."

"Or the Lord Chancellor," said Lord George. "One is just as likely
as the other. I wish I could get at what you really think. The whole
thing would be so complete if all you three suspected me. I can't get
out of it all by going to Paris or Kamschatka, as I should have half
a dozen detectives on my heels wherever I went. I must brazen it out
here; and the worst of it is, that I feel that a look of guilt is
creeping over me. I have a sort of conviction growing upon me that I
shall be taken up and tried, and that a jury will find me guilty. I
dream about it; and if,--as is probable,--it drives me mad, I'm sure
that I shall accuse myself in my madness. There's a fascination about
it that I can't explain or escape. I go on thinking how I would have
done it if I did do it. I spend hours in calculating how much I would
have realised, and where I would have found my market. I couldn't
keep myself from asking Benjamin the other day how much they would be
worth to him."

"What did he say?" asked Lizzie, who sat gazing upon the Corsair, and
who was now herself fascinated. Lord George was walking about the
room, then sitting for a moment in one chair and again in another,
and after a while leaning on the mantelpiece. In his speaking he
addressed himself almost exclusively to Lizzie, who could not keep
her eyes from his.

"He grinned greasily," said the Corsair, "and told me they had
already been offered to him once before by you."

"That's false," said Lizzie.

"Very likely. And then he said that no doubt they'd fall into his
hands some day. 'Wouldn't it be a game, Lord George,' he said, 'if,
after all, they should be no more than paste?' That made me think
he had got them, and that he'd get paste diamonds put into the same
setting,--and then give them up with some story of his own making.
'You'd know whether they were paste or not; wouldn't you, Lord
George?' he asked." The Corsair, as he repeated Mr. Benjamin's words,
imitated the Jew's manner so well, that he made Lizzie shudder.
"While I was there, a detective named Gager came in."

"The same man who came here, perhaps," suggested Mrs. Carbuncle.

"I think not. He seemed to be quite intimate with Mr. Benjamin, and
went on at once about the diamonds. Benjamin said that they'd made
their way over to Paris, and that he'd heard of them. I found myself
getting quite intimate with Mr. Gager, wh