“You see,” said Punch, “I saw the pajamas going across in the moonlight. That’s how I knew about the tear in the leg. There are lots of nails sticking out in the trunk closet. I might have thought of that. But when you went up-stairs I couldn’t think why anybody should, or rather, why anybody who slept up-stairs should have come down, so I followed up to see. Well, I didn’t see anything or hear anything, so I came back. I was sort of scared myself.” The first look of bewilderment in Raglan’s face had deepened into one of sour disgust. Mr. Smith set about restoring his complacency. “Well, your plan worked,” he commented. “The imitation necklace served to decoy the real one back just as you meant it to. “If you remember,” he added, turning to me, “it was the curiously imaginative quality of this stroke which gave the whole affair to my mind the look--what you will perhaps allow me to call the style--we were speaking of. I should have recognized his handiwork from that alone.” Raglan beamed again and took a dainty draught or two of his cigar. “Oh, there was nothing to it really,” he said, with a falsely deprecatory air that made me want to hit him. “It needed a bit of luck to put it through, but I had it right enough, and I knew I had it too. “I heard our young friend Applebury getting his instructions, the first thing yesterday morning, to go to the bank and get the real necklace. I knew it would be somewhere in this house before night. “I didn’t know where it would be. It might turn out to be in any one of four places. The girl might have it, or her mother, or her grandmother--though I doubted if they’d trust it again to that Noah’s Ark of a safe. “But it struck me that the best chance of all was Applebury. He’d put up his money for it, and he’d hang on to it if he could. So I decided to try his room first. “I made another of my mistakes then. I didn’t realize that there was any one left alive in the world who’d be such a fool as to try to guard a thing by sleeping with it under his pillow. I thought he’d either hide it seriously, or else attach it somehow to his person; put it on around his neck. That would have been the simplest thing. “I chose the other alternative first, since it wouldn’t involve giving him a tap on the head. I began a search of the room. I began with the bureau, and found it wasn’t there. Then I heard some one coming, and slid into the bay window, behind one of the curtains. There was an amateur thief on the job it seemed, in pajamas just as I was. “I watched him pretty close through a crack between the curtain and the wall. It was possible, of course, that he’d get the thing. He was a rank amateur all right. He hadn’t rummaged more than a second or two over the bureau top before he hit something with his hand and moved it with a rattle.