So there we were! It was a dreadful predicament. Every morning we read the papers with our hearts thumping like hammers. Every ring at the bell made us jump, and we had a deadly fear that each time the portière was lifted and a caller appeared we’d see the buttons and helmet of a policeman with a warrant of arrest concealed upon his person. I began to have awful dreams and Daisy didn’t sleep at all, and got pale and peaked. We thought up more “plausible stories,” but they seemed to get less probable every time, and all our spare moments together, which used to be so happy and care free, were now dark and harassed as the meetings of conspirators. Even concealing the miserable things was a wearing anxiety. First we decided to divide them, Daisy to wear her half in the chamois bag hung around her neck, while I concealed mine in a money-belt worn under my clothes. We had about decided on that and I’d bought the belt, when we got the idea that if we were killed in an accident they’d be found on us, and then our memoirs would go down to posterity blackened with shame. So we just put them back in the bag and locked them up in Daisy’s jewel-case, round which we hovered as they say a murderer does round the hiding-place of his victim. I never knew before how burglars felt; but if it was anything like the way Daisy and I did, I wonder anybody ever takes to that perilous trade. We were the most unhappy creatures in London, feeling ourselves a pair of thieves, and our unpolluted, innocent home no better than a “fence.” There was less in the papers about the Castlecourt diamonds robbery, but that did not give us any peace; for, in the first place, we didn’t know for certain that we had the Castlecourt diamonds, and, in the second, when we now and then did see dark allusions to the sleuths being “on a new and more promising scent,” we modestly supposed that we might be the quarry to which it led. Daisy began to talk of “going to prison” as a termination of her career that might not be so far distant, and to the thought of which she was growing reconciled. This about covers the ground of my immediate connection with the stolen diamonds. Their subsequent disposition is a matter in which my wife is more concerned than I am. She also will be able to tell her part of the story with more literary frills than I can muster up. I’m no writing man, and all I’ve tried to do is to state my part of the affair honestly and clearly. Statement of John Burns Gilsey, private detective, especially engaged on the Castlecourt diamond case. Statement of John Burns Gilsey, private detective, especially engaged on the Castlecourt diamond case.