‘If I’d thought you were I shouldn’t have come here,’ said the grey-bearded old man. ‘I want to deal with a gentleman. I am a gentleman myself, though a decayed one. I have not come on my own business, but on that of a friend, a man you know by name and repute as well as you know the Prince of Wales--a man carrying on one of the most successful businesses in London. I’m not going to tell you his name. I only give you the facts. My friend has bills coming due to-morrow. If they are dishonoured he must be in the _Gazette_ next week. In his difficulty he went to his wife, and made a clean breast of it. She behaved as a good woman ought, put her arms round his neck and told him not to be down-hearted, and then ran for her jewel-case, and gave him her diamonds.’ ‘Let us have a look at these said diamonds,’ replied Mr. Mosheh, without vouchsafing any praise of the wife’s devotion. The man took out a small parcel, and unfolded it. There, on a sheet of cotton wool, reposed the gems, five-and-thirty large white stones, the smallest of them as big as a pea. ‘Why, they’re unset!’ exclaimed the diamond merchant. ‘How’s that?’ ‘My friend is a proud man. He didn’t want his wife’s jewels to be recognised.’ ‘So he broke up the setting? Your friend was a fool, sir. What do these stones belong to?’ speculated Mr. Mosheh, touching the gems lightly with the tip of his fleshy forefinger, and arranging them in a circle. ‘A collet necklace, evidently, and a very fine collet necklace it must have been. Your friend was an idiot to destroy it.’ ‘I believe it was a necklace,’ assented the visitor. ‘My friend celebrated his silver wedding last year, and the diamonds were a gift to his wife on that occasion.’ The room was dimly lighted with a single candle, which the servant had set down upon the centre table when she admitted the stranger. Mr. Mosheh drew down a moveable gutta-percha gas tube, and lighted an office lamp which stood beside his desk. By this light he examined the jewels. Not content with the closest inspection, he took a little file from his waistcoat pocket, and drew it across the face of one of the stones. ‘Your friend is doubly a fool, if he isn’t a knave,’ said Mr. Mosheh. ‘These stones are sham.’ There came a look so ghastly over the face of the grey-bearded man that the aspect of death itself could hardly have been more awful. ‘It’s a lie!’ he gasped.