"Teddy is just going out and I was to be left in solitary bereavement if you had not appeared," she explained airily. "It wasn't very compy only to come to see me on business by the way, Mr Carrados, but if those are your only terms I must agree." Straithwaite, however, did not seem to have the least intention of going. He had left his hat and stick in the hall and he now threw his yellow gloves down on a table and took up a negligent position on the arm of an easy-chair. "The thing is, where do we stand?" he remarked tentatively. "That is the attitude of the insurance company, I imagine," replied Carrados. "I don't see that the company has any standing in the matter. We haven't reported any loss to them and we are not making any claim, so far. That ought to be enough." "I assume that they act on general inference," explained Carrados. "A limited liability company is not subtle, Mrs Straithwaite. This one knows that you have insured a five-thousand-pound pearl necklace with it, and when it becomes a matter of common knowledge that you have had one answering to that description stolen, it jumps to the conclusion that they are one and the same." "But they aren't--worse luck," explained the hostess. "This was a string that I let Markhams send me to see if I would keep." "The one that Bellitzer saw last Saturday?" "Yes," admitted Mrs Straithwaite quite simply. Straithwaite glanced sharply at Carrados and then turned his eyes with lazy indifference to his wife. "My dear Stephanie, what are you thinking of?" he drawled. "Of course those could not have been Markhams' pearls. Not knowing that you are much too clever to do such a foolish thing, Mr Carrados will begin to think that you have had fraudulent designs upon his company." Whether the tone was designed to exasperate or merely fell upon a fertile soil, Stephanie threw a hateful little glance in his direction. "I don't care," she exclaimed recklessly; "I haven't the least little objection in the world to Mr Carrados knowing exactly how it happened." Carrados put in an instinctive word of warning, even raised an arresting hand, but the lady was much too excited, too voluble, to be denied. "It doesn't really matter in the least, Mr Carrados, because nothing came of it," she explained. "There never were any real pearls to be insured. It would have made no difference to the company, because I did not regard this as an ordinary insurance from the first. It was to be a loan." "A loan?" repeated Carrados. "Yes. I shall come into heaps and heaps of money in a few years' time under Prin-Prin's will. Then I should pay back whatever had been advanced." "But would it not have been better--simpler--to have borrowed purely on the anticipation?" "We have," explained the lady eagerly. "We have borrowed from all sorts of people, and both Teddy and I have signed heaps and heaps of papers, until now no one will lend any more."