“All right,” she said. “Come along to grandmother. Do you know what she wants?” He was afraid, somehow, that if he told her she’d refuse, so instead of answering her question he reminded her that she was starting off without her cane. She laughed and darted across the room to get it. Then, with her arm through his, she limped decorously down the hall to her grandmother’s room. The old lady had opened the safe door, and had the brown morocco case in her lap. “That isn’t your dinner dress, is it?” she complained at sight of her granddaughter. “I sent word you were to come when you were dressed. I wanted to see how you’d look in the pearls. However, now you’re here, you may as well put them on.” Punch had been watching his sister, for the sight of the morocco case in his grandmother’s lap had convinced him that everything was all right. He saw her eyes widen a little. At the same moment his grandmother uttered a wheezy sort of shriek. He turned and looked. The box she held in her hand was empty. “Shut the door!” Judy commanded, and his prompt obedience came none too soon, for with the old woman’s next breath she cried out, full voice, “They’re gone. She’s taken them. Your mother’s taken them.” “Are they _really_ gone?” Judy asked. Then to Punch’s amazement she began to laugh. CHAPTER IV SOMETHING BEHIND I had three visitors that evening. Punch was the first. He ditched the dinner at The Oaks and rode over on his bicycle in time to dine with me--to go through the motions of dining with me, rather, for he ate hardly anything. He was, of course, terribly cast down by the loss of the necklace which he had tried so conscientiously to guard. He felt, too, that if the others had treated the case as seriously as he had done, it needn’t have happened. They hadn’t treated it seriously, none of them, with the exception of Uncle Alec. They’d laughed at him for having the necklace on the brain. They’d implored him to forget it and not be a pest. He didn’t, though, entirely acquit himself of negligence. That half-hour or more while they had waited in the veranda for the arrival of the guests, he himself with the others, might have given the thief, assuming that he’d secreted himself in the house at some time previously, his opportunity. And this was just the time, Punch said, when he should have been on the job. “Oh, come!” I protested. “There were plenty of other chances for the thing to be taken. You couldn’t have stayed on guard all the time.” He insisted with a vehemence which didn’t strike me as quite like him that this was when the necklace had disappeared. “The necklace is known to have been seen,” I argued, “by nobody since your grandmother showed it to you yesterday afternoon. She put it back in the safe and locked it up. It seems to me our difficulty is that there have been so many chances to take it.” “For who to take it?” he asked me. “Why, for almost anybody who was in the house,” I said.