"I had the duplicate ready," Harvey Grimm explained. "That was my game. I changed them underneath my handkerchief. It was perfectly easy. They've got the imitation one at police head-quarters and they aren't feeling particularly pleased with themselves. That fellow Brodie is about the bummest detective who ever crossed the Atlantic." Aaron Rodd was sitting transfixed. His fingers were shaking as they beat upon the desk. "My God," he exclaimed as light streamed in upon him, "we're thieves!" "Don't talk like a fool," the other admonished. "It's a fair enough game between crooks. We've stolen a stolen jewel, and by doing it we've saved the girl and her grandfather and her brother, too, from gaol. That's fair do's, isn't it? When I've finished with that, there'll be a matter of three or four thousand pounds for us to divide. What about it, eh?" He swept the jewel back into his pocket. Aaron Rodd's fingers were still idly beating upon the desk. The walls of his dusty, bare apartment had fallen away, the thrall of his sordid poverty lay no longer like a dead weight upon his spirits. Three or four thousand pounds to divide! "What you need," Harvey Grimm declared briskly, handing him his hat, "is a drink. Come right along." _Chapter II_ _Poetry by Compulsion_ Mr. Paul Brodie walked, unannounced, into Aaron Rodd's office, a matter of ten days after the episode of the changed diamond. He had lost a little of his bombast, and he carried himself with less than his usual confidence. His eyes, however, had lost none of their old inquisitive fire. He was perfectly aware, even as he greeted the two men who rose to welcome him, that Aaron Rodd was wearing a new suit of clothes, that the office had been spring-cleaned, that the box of cigarettes upon the desk were of an expensive brand, and that the violets in the buttonhole of Harvey Grimm's immaculate coat had come from a Bond Street florist. "Good morning, gentlemen," he said airily, subsiding into the chair which the latter had vacated for him. "Nice little trio of conspirators we are, eh?" Harvey Grimm shrugged his shoulders. "It's rough on you," he admitted--"gives you kind of a twist, of course, with the police--but I can't see any sense in the thing yet. They weren't meaning to trade off that bit of paste on a diamond expert surely!" The detective scratched his chin. "That bit of paste," he declared, "was all they had on them, anyway. Seems as though they hadn't quite sized you up--you and Mr. Rodd here--and were paying you a test visit. Gee, they're clever!" "You had them searched, I suppose," the other enquired, "to be sure they hadn't the real goods with them?" "You bet!" the detective assented gloomily. "Made it all the worse for us afterwards. I tell you I daren't show my face at Scotland Yard these days." Harvey Grimm nodded sympathetically. "Still, they must know that these people aren't what they profess to be," he observed.