seemed something so uncanny and terrible about it that the beads of perspiration stood on my forehead, and my hand shook until I nearly dropped the case.

"Frank," I said, "there's deeper work here than you think; this is the necklace which you believe you buried with your wife; well, what is this one, then, that I have in my pocket?"

I opened the second case and laid the jewels side by side. You could not have told one bauble from the other unless you had possessed such an eye as mine, which will fidget over a sham diamond when it is yet a yard away. He had no doubt that they were identical; and when he saw them together, he began to cry like a frightened woman.

"What does it mean?" he asked. "Have they robbed my wife's grave? My God!—two necklaces alike down to the very engraving. Who has done it? Who could do such a thing with a woman who[ 42] never harmed a living soul? Bernard, if I spend every shilling I possess, I will get to the bottom of this thing! Oh, my wife, my wife——"

[ 42]

His distress would have moved an adamantine heart, and was not a thing to cavil at. The mystery, which had completely unnerved him, had fascinated me so strangely that I determined not to leave Paris until the last line of its solution was written. The robbery of the grave I could quite understand, but that there should be two necklaces, one of them with real stones and the other with imitation, was a fact before which my imagination reeled. As for him, he continued to sit in his arm-chair, and to fret like a child; and there I left him while I went to consult the first detective I could run against.

The difficulties in getting at the police of Paris are proverbial. The officials there hold it such an impertinence for a mere civilian to inform them of anything at all, that the unfortunate pursuer of the criminal comes at last to believe himself guilty of some crime. I put up with some hours, badgering at the nearest bureau, and then having no French but that which is fit for publication, I returned to the Rue de Morny, getting on the way some glimmer of a plan into my head. I found Brewer in the same wandering state as I had left him; and although he listened when I spoke, I felt sure that his mind was in that infantile condition which can neither beget a plan nor realize one. For himself, he had a single idea; and upon that he harped usque ad nauseam.

"I must send for Jules," he kept muttering;[ 43] "Jules knew her well; he was 

 Prev. P 21/151 next