It was an innocent question designed to keep the sybil going. Madame Beattie's eyes narrowed slightly. You could see what she had been in the day of her power. "He had to," said she, with an admiringly dramatic simplicity. "I wanted it." "But--" began Lydia, and Madame Beattie put up a small hand with a gesture of rebuttal. "Well, time went on, and he needed the necklace back. However, that doesn't belong to the story. Some years ago, just before your Jeff got into trouble, I came over here to the States. I was singing then more or less." A concentrated power, of even a noble sort, came into her face. There was bitterness too, for she had to remember how disastrous a venture it had been. "I needed money, you understand. I couldn't have got an audience over there. I thought here they might come to hear me--to say they'd heard me--the younger generation--and see my jewels. I hadn't many left. I'd sold most of them. Well, I was mistaken. I couldn't get a house. The fools!" Scorn ate up her face alive and opened it out, a sneering mask. They were fools indeed, she knew, who would not stir the ashes of such embers in search of one spark left. "I'm a very strong woman. But I rather broke down then. I came here to Esther. She was the only relation I had, except my stepsister, and she was off travelling. Susan was always ashamed of me. She went to Europe on purpose. Well, I came here. And Esther wished I was at the bottom of the sea. But she liked my necklace, and she stole it." Esther, as Lydia had seen her sitting in a long chair and eating candied fruit, had been a figure of such civilised worth, however odious, that Lydia said involuntarily, in a loud voice: "She couldn't. I don't believe it." "Oh, but she did," said Madame Beattie, looking at her with the coolness of one who holds the cards. "She owned she did." "To you?" "To Jeff. He was madly in love with her then. Married, you understand, but frightfully in love. Yes, she owned it. I always thought that was why he wasn't sorry to go to jail. If he'd stayed out there was the question of the necklace. And Esther. He didn't know what to do with her." "But he made her give it back," said Lydia, out of agonised certainty that she must above all believe in him. "He couldn't. She said she'd lost it." Lydia stared at her, and her own face went white. Now the picture of youth and age confronting each other was of the sybil dealing inexorable hurts and youth anguished in the face of them. "She said she'd lost it," Madame Beattie went on, in almost chuckling enjoyment of her tale. "She said it had bewitched her. That was true enough. She'd gone to New York. She came back by boat. Crazy thing for a woman to do. And she said she stayed on deck late, and stood by the rail and took the necklace out of her bag to hold it up in the moonlight. And it slipped out of her hands." "Into the water?" "She said so." "You don't believe it." Lydia read that clearly in the contemptuous old face.