"When I came to, the lights were still burning, the door of the safe was open, the room empty; I had been flung on to a couch at the foot of the bed. I was lying there quite free." "Was the safe empty?" asked Calladine suddenly. "I didn't look," she answered. "Oh!"--and she covered her face spasmodically with her hands. "I looked at the bed. Someone was lying there--under a sheet and quite still. There was a clock ticking in the room; it was the only sound. I was terrified. I was going mad with fear. If I didn't get out of the room at once I felt that I should go mad, that I should scream and bring everyone to find me alone with--what was under the sheet in the bed. I ran to the door and looked out through a slit into the corridor. It was still quite empty, and below the music still throbbed in the ballroom. I crept down the stairs, meeting no one until I reached the hall. I looked into the ballroom as if I was searching for someone. I stayed long enough to show myself. Then I got a cab and came to you." A short silence followed. Joan Carew looked at her companion in appeal. "You are the only one I could come to," she added. "I know no one else." Calladine sat watching the girl in silence. Then he asked, and his voice was hard: "And is that all you have to tell me?" "Yes." "You are quite sure?" Joan Carew looked at him perplexed by the urgency of his question. She reflected for a moment or two. "Quite." Calladine rose to his feet and stood beside her. "Then how do you come to be wearing this?" he asked, and he lifted a chain of platinum and diamonds which she was wearing about her shoulders. "You weren't wearing it when you danced with me." Joan Carew stared at the chain. "No. It's not mine. I have never seen it before." Then a light came into her eyes. "The two men--they must have thrown it over my head when I was on the couch--before they went." She looked at it more closely. "That's it. The chain's not very valuable. They could spare it, and--it would accuse me--of what they did." "Yes, that's very good reasoning," said Calladine coldly. Joan Carew looked quickly up into his face. "Oh, you don't believe me," she cried. "You think--oh, it's impossible." And, holding him by the edge of his coat, she burst into a storm of passionate denials. "But you went to steal, you know," he said gently, and she answered him at once: "Yes, I did, but not this." And she held up the necklace. "Should I have stolen this, should I have come to you wearing it, if I had stolen the pearls, if I had"--and she stopped--"if my story were not true?" Calladine weighed her argument, and it affected him. "No, I think you wouldn't," he said frankly.