A queer look went over his face, as if that off-hand remark of mine had frightened him. “Not for any one who _would_ take it,” he said. “Of course there were chances for people who wouldn’t.” At that I got an idea. I asked him suddenly, “How do you know that the necklace has really been taken? Your grandmother sprang the loss of it on you and Judy in a rather dramatic way. Isn’t it possible that she adopted your idea that the jewels ought to be hidden somewhere rather than kept in the safe? She’d been rather annoyed at your insistence that they oughtn’t to be in the safe, although she’d become convinced, more or less, that you were right about it. She’d been still more annoyed at Judy for saying she didn’t want the necklace. “Well, then, she sends you to get Judy, opens the safe, tucks the pearls away somewhere--in her own dress perhaps--and then springs the empty box on the pair of you. Isn’t that possible? She has guarded against their being stolen, and she’s scored off you and Judy at the same time.” “She wasn’t paying any attention to Judy and me. She didn’t even notice that Judy laughed. She was screaming that mother had taken them. Practically out of her head. Miss Digby had to give her a hypodermic to quiet her.” That shattered my theory. It had been no joke, even of the grimmest, for the old woman. But my mind had already fastened on something else. “Judy laughed, you say, when she saw that the necklace was gone?” He hadn’t told me that before. “Yes,” he said. I remarked that it was natural enough that she should be a bit hysterical for the moment after a loss of that kind. “That wasn’t the _way_ she laughed,” he told me. “She laughed as if it was something that didn’t matter very much, but was rather funny. As if she was really thinking about something else. But I don’t know why she laughed nor what the other thing was she was thinking about.” His voice had faltered, but he had forced it to the end of the sentence, and I perceived what I might have guessed earlier. The thing the boy was agonizing over lay deeper than the disappearance of the necklace, although behind it perhaps, and connected with it. “Well,” I said cheerfully, “we know Judy didn’t steal the necklace anyway, nor your mother, either. Go back to the time the people came and tell me everything that’s happened.” It steadied him to have a piece of perfectly straight reporting like that to do; something that called the faculties of his active, orderly mind into play, and he went ahead and gave me the narrative of the afternoon, substantially as I have put it down in the preceding chapter. I didn’t interrupt him with questions. But when he had finished I asked a few. “Miss Digby wouldn’t have stayed in the room while your grandmother was lying down, would she?” “Not in her bedroom,” he said. “But it’s her sitting-room next door where the safe is. I thought she was going to stay in the sitting-room, but I’m not sure she did.”