My companion motioned me into the second box while he stepped briskly into that nearer the foot-lights. "Now, the young lady sat there," he said, placing the gilt chair back against the brass railing. Then he sat down in it, facing the stage. Having done so, he took off his hat and placed it on the box floor. "Now you show me where that man sat." I placed the chair against the plush-covered parapet and dropped into it. "Here," I explained, "within two feet of where you are." "All right!" was his sudden and quite unexpected rejoinder. "That's enough! That'll do!" He reached down and groped about for his hat before rising from the chair. He brushed it with the sleeve of his coat absently, and then stepped out of the box. "We'd better be getting back," he called to me from the sheet-iron covered doorway. "Back to what?" I demanded, as I followed him out through the canvas-lined maze again, feeling that he was in some way tricking me, resenting the foolish mystery which he was flinging about the whole foolish maneuver. "Back to those guests of yours and some good old-fashioned common sense," was his retort. But during the ride back to Sherry's he had nothing further to say to me. His answers to the questions I put to him were either evasive or monosyllabic. He even yawned, yawned openly and audibly, as we drew up at the carriage entrance of that munificently lighted hostelry. He now seemed nothing more than a commonplace man tired out at the completion of a commonplace task. He even seemed a trifle impatient at my delay as I waited to check my hat and coat--a formality in which he did not join me. "Now, I can give you people just two minutes," he said, as the five of us were once more seated at the same table and he once more consulted his turnip of a watch. "And I guess that's more'n we'll need." He turned to the wan and tired-eyed girl, who, only too plainly, had not altogether enjoyed her wait. "You've got the necklace?" he asked. She held up a hand from which the string of graduated pearls dangled. The man then turned to me. "You took this string of pearls away from this man?" he asked, with a quick nod toward the jewel thief. "I assuredly did," was my answer. "Knowing he had taken them from this young lady earlier in the evening?" "Your assumption bears every mark of genius!" I assured him. He turned back to the girl. "Is that your necklace?" he curtly demanded. The girl looked at me with clouded and troubled eyes. We all felt, in some foolish way, that the moment was a climactic one. "No!" she answered, in little more than a whisper. "You're positive?" She nodded her head without speaking. The man turned to me. "Yet you followed this man, assaulted him, and forcibly took that necklace away from him?" "Hold on!" I cried, angered by that calmly pedagogic manner of his. "I want you to un--" He stopped me with a sharp move of the hand.