“And you have no trace of any vessel?”

“Lloyd’s can tell us nothing. There has been no report made. It is evident that the man fell off a ship, though what ship, and where, heaven alone knows.”

This, I am afraid, was obvious. The police had asked me to identify the jewels and now that it was done I could be of no more service to them. It remained to see what Baron Louis de Rothschild would have to say, and when I had reminded Murray of that, I took my leave. It would be idle to pretend that I had come to any opinion which might help him. To me, as to others, the case seemed one of profound mystery. A dead seaman carried jewels of great price hidden in his clothes, and he had fallen overboard from a ship. If some first tremor of an idea came to me, I found it in the word “ship.” A seaman and a ship—yes, I must remember that.

And this will bring me to the last and most astonishing feature of this perplexing mystery. Baron Louis expressed the greatest incredulity when he heard of the loss of his famous jewel. It was at his banker’s in Paris, he declared. A telegram to the French house brought the reply that they had the stone sure enough, and that it was in safe keeping, both literally and in metaphor. To this I answered by the pen of my friend at Scotland Yard that if the bankers would cause the stone to be examined for the second time, they would find it either to be false or of a quality so poor that it could never be mistaken by any expert for the Red Diamond of Ford Valley. Once more fact confirmed my suppositions. The jewel in Paris was a coarse stone, of little value, and as unlike the real gem as any stone could be. Plainly the Baron had been robbed, though when and by whom he had not the remotest idea.

You will admit that this twentieth century conception of theft is not without its ingenuity. The difference in value between a diamond of the first water and the third is as the difference between a sovereign and a shilling. Your latter day thief, desiring some weeks of leisure in which to dispose of a well-known jewel, will sometimes be content with less than the full value of his enterprise. He substitutes a stone of dubious quality for one of undoubted purity. Madam, it may be, thinks her diamonds want cleaning, and determines to send them to the jeweller’s when she can spare them. That may be in six months’ time, when her beautiful gems are already sparkling upon the breast of a Rajah or his latest favourite. And she never can be certain that her diamonds were as fine as she believed them to be.

This 

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