I could understand her doing that, though. What was harder to understand was her sudden surrender. It wasn’t like Judy to come to heel just because she’d found that liberty wasn’t quite what it was cracked up to be. Something worse than that must have happened to her. Whatever had happened, though, even if she’d got involved in devious ways, I was sure they weren’t of her seeking. I felt about this present business much as Punch did. I wanted the thief caught; the air, so sultry with mystery and suspicion, cleared by a good fresh wind. And yet I had just given Victoria my promise to do what I could to help hush things up. Why the devil had I done that? Well, I knew why. It was because, when she had said that her children were all in the world that she really cared anything about, I had believed she was telling the truth. All the same I didn’t relish the prospect of my talk with Alexander Corbin. That, however, came off better than I had anticipated. I found I liked him, just as Punch had done. And he showed no trace of the stubbornness of which Victoria had accused him. He seemed to me extraordinarily open-minded, and he carried the virtue of candor further than I’d have been able to do myself, I think, in similar circumstances. I remembered him faintly, as one would remember the younger brother of a boyhood friend, and by way of putting some feeling of cordiality into my greeting, I told him so, without the qualifications. “That’s nice of you,” he said. “But you wouldn’t have recognized me if you’d met me on the street.” “No,” I admitted, “I don’t suppose I should.” “Well, there you are!” he said. “I doubt if anybody would. I’m all but a total stranger. And I find myself in the middle of a family snarl like this. I come on here for my niece’s wedding, and within twenty-four hours a highly portable piece of my mother’s property, worth perhaps a hundred thousand dollars, disappears.” “Good God!” I cried. “You aren’t trying to tell me that any one suspects _you_ of having taken it?” “That’s very polite of you,” he remarked kindly, “but I don’t see why they shouldn’t. It’s evident that Victoria and Judy both regard it as an inside job of some sort. And surely I’ve a more obvious motive, as they say in detective stories, for taking it than any one else in the family. I quarreled with my mother pretty near thirty years ago; I’ve come home at last to make it up; I find her so shaken by age and--infirmity that it’s very doubtful if any new will she made now would hold water,--and I steal the necklace by way of getting my share of the estate. “It’s all rot, of course, but that’s how it looks. What I’d like to do is to put a cordon around the house and have everybody in it searched, beginning with me and Applebury’s maiden aunts. I want it found, if it involves tearing the plaster off the walls. Of course it isn’t possible to go to such lengths as that, but it seems as if one might do something.