“No, it’s Bruce,” I said. “He was robbed of the necklace last night.” “But why did you say anything about Bill?” she persisted. “Your mother wanted to know whether I could tell them where he was. It was Alec who talked to me.” She was still looking rather wild-eyed, like one under some nightmare apprehension. Indeed I thought the shadows of the sleep she’d just awakened from must still be clouding her mind a little. The fact was, of course, that she was thinking straighter and faster than I. “Which necklace do you suppose it was,” I asked, “that Bruce was robbed of; the real one or the imitation?” “The real one, of course,” she said. “It’s the only one he had. He brought it home from the bank, you see, and when mother couldn’t get the imitation away from Gran, in order to put the real one in place of it, Bruce said he thought it would be safer if he kept it and if nobody knew he had it. Nobody did know he had it but mother and me.” She made a full stop there. Then, “And Bill,” she added. “Of course I told him.” She swung her legs off the couch as if about to spring to her feet, but arrested the action half-completed. She was thinking, I could see, with an agonized intensity, and I found myself now upon the trail of her thoughts. “Your mother must have read your note,” I observed. “That’s why she had Alec ask me if I knew where Bill was. You wrote a note to Bruce, too, didn’t you? How did you deliver that one?” “I had Bill take it into his room,” she said, “after he’d gone to sleep. That’s what we waited for. That’s why we were so late getting away.” It’s Judy’s order that this story isn’t to be a whitewash, so I must in common honesty forbear to apply the brush to myself. I didn’t, even for one grisly moment, believe that Bill was the thief; that his elopement with Judy had been a mere pretext and that he was speeding away now to parts unknown with the necklace in his pocket. But I perceived the plausibility of the pattern his actions made. It wasn’t merely that he had known Bruce had the necklace, that he’d gone to Bruce’s room when Bruce was asleep, and that he and the necklace were now gone. There were some queerly confirmatory details. He hadn’t been willing to consider eloping with Judy until he knew Bruce had the necklace. He had been at some pains to leave Judy in my hands as soon as possible after they’d got out of the house. It had struck me that he’d been rather unreasonably in a hurry to set out on his quest of the license clerk. He’d shown a dislike of hearing the necklace discussed; had run away--this was Judy’s own explanation--from hearing her story of its adventures. I didn’t believe that any of this nightmare nonsense really explained anything, but I did find myself wishing, with a kind of prayerful intensity, that he would come back now with his parson and his license. How long had he been gone? What time was it anyhow? By the clock on the mantelpiece it was quarter to seven.