"Well, now, I ask you," said Madame Beattie, "was there ever such a silly tale? A young woman of New England traditions--yes, they're ridiculous, but you've got to reckon with them--she comes home on a Fall River boat and doesn't even stay in her cabin, but hangs round on decks and plays with priceless diamonds in the moonlight. Why, it's enough to make the cat laugh." Madame Beattie, in spite of her cosmopolitan reign, was at least local enough to remember the feline similes Lydia put such dependence on, and she used this one with relish. Lydia felt the more at home. "But what did she do with it?" she insisted. "I don't know," said Madame Beattie idly. "Put it in a safety deposit in New York perhaps. Don't ask me." "But don't you care?" cried Lydia, all of a heat of wonder--terror also at melodramatic thieving here in simple Addington. "I can care about things without screaming and sobbing," said Madame Beattie briefly. "Though I sobbed a little at the time. I was a good deal unstrung from other causes. But of course I laid it before Jeff, as her husband--" "He must have been heartbroken." "Well, he was her husband. He was responsible for her, wasn't he? I told him I wouldn't expose the creature. Only he'd have to pay me for the necklace." The yellow-white face wavered before Lydia. She was trying to make her brain accept the raw material Madame Beattie was pouring into it and evolve some product she could use. "But he couldn't pay you. He'd just got into difficulties. You said so." "Bless you, he hadn't got into any difficulty until Esther pushed him in by helping herself to my necklace. He turned crazy over it. He hadn't enough to pay for it. So he went into the market and tried a big _coup_ with all his own money and the money he was holding--people subscribed for his mines, you know, or whatever they were--and that minute there was a panic. And the courts, or whatever it was, got hold of him for using the mails for fraudulent purposes or whatever, and he lost his head. And that's all there was about it." Lydia's thoughts were racing so fast it seemed to her that she--some inner determined frightened self in her--was flying to overtake them. "Then you did it," she said. "You! you forced him, you pushed him--" "To pay me for my necklace," Madame Beattie supplied. "Of course I did. It was a very bad move, as it proved. I was a fool; but then I might have known. Old Lepidus told me the conjunction was bad for me." "Who was Lepidus?" "The astrologer. He died last month, the fool, and never knew he was going to. But he'd encouraged me to come on my concert tour, and when that went wrong I lost confidence. It was a bad year, a bad year." A troop of conclusions were rushing at Lydia, all demanding to be fitted in.