“That’s all plausible enough. It may all be true. It would account, after a fashion, for the disappearance of the imitation necklace from the safe. She might have taken it herself; she might have persuaded Judy to take it. “But into that picture you can not fit the return of the necklace. You can’t fit the man in pajamas, whom Punch saw. I have no intelligible picture, yet, into which that man will fit. But the return, I tell you frankly, seems to me to be sinister. It suggests strongly the presence somewhere, as an active possibility, of the real necklace--not stolen yet, but waiting to be. And accompanying that theft we may have anything, up to murder. That’s why I say it’s dangerous to feel too sure.” With great deliberation, he extinguished his cigar in the ash tray and rose to his full height. “Invited or not,” he said, “I’m going to that house this afternoon. I want to see the people in it. There aren’t a great many first-class jewel thieves in the world, and I know the faces of a pretty fair proportion of them. Of course people who aren’t jewel thieves sometimes attempt to steal jewels--a covetous girl, a boy desperately in debt, might make a frantic clutch, with no forethought, no preparation, and of course, no possibility of ultimate success. “If that’s the case here, I’m as helpless as any of you, for I can’t read thoughts or intentions from people’s faces. “But somehow to me the thing hasn’t quite that look. So I’m going over to see whether I know any of Victoria’s guests better than she does.--How about you? Will you come along? Can you manage in a comfortable motor, if you’ve lots of room?” I could manage it, all right, and my first impulse was to say I’d go. Then I thought of something and changed my mind. “I think I’ll stay at home this afternoon,” I told him, “and rest up for that dinner.” CHAPTER IX MYSTIFICATION OF EAGLE-EYE It was the thought of Judy that made me change my mind about going to The Oaks with old Mr. Smith. I thought that perhaps if I were alone at the cottage all the afternoon, and if the fact that I was here alone were advertised by the presence of my ancient guest at The Oaks, she might come back and tell me the story which he had prevented my hearing at the summer-house. My concern for the child was fast deepening into an acute distress. I was spared, to be sure, the misery of doubting her essential rectitude. I’d known her from the time she was a baby, and the long intervals when I’d seen nothing of her had neither interrupted the growth of our friendship, nor changed the quality of it.