"I saw Madame Beattie last night," said Lydia; and she went on to tell what Madame Beattie had said. She warmed to it, and being of a dramatic type, she coloured the story as Madame Beattie might have done. There was a shade of cynicism here, a tang of worldliness there; and it sounded like the hardest fact. But when she came to Esther, she saw his glance quicken and fasten on hers the more keenly, and when she told him Madame Beattie believed the necklace had not been lost at all, he was looking at her with astonishment even. "You say--" he began, and made her rehearse it all again in snatches. He cross-examined her, not, it seemed, as if he wished to prove she lied, but to take in her monstrous truth. And after they had been over it two or three times and she felt excited and breathless and greatly fagged by the strain of saying the same thing in different ways, she saw in his face the look she had seen in Anne's. "Why," she cried out, in actual pain, "you don't believe me." Choate didn't answer that. He sat for a minute, considering gravely, and then threw down the paper knife he had been bending while she talked. It was ivory, and it gave a little shallow click on the table and that, slight as it was, made her nerves jump. She felt suddenly that she was in deeper than she had expected to be. "Do you realise," he began gravely, "what you accuse Mrs. Blake of?" Lydia had not been used to think of her by that name and she asked, with lifted glance: "Esther?" "Yes. Mrs. Jeffrey Blake." "She took the necklace," said Lydia. She spoke with the dull obstinacy that made Anne shake her sometimes and then kiss her into kindness, she was so pretty. But Alston Choate, she saw, was not going to find it a road to prettiness. He was after the truth like a dog on a scent, and he didn't think he had it yet. "Madame Beattie," he said, "tells you she believes that Esther--" his voice slipped caressingly on the word with the lovingness of usage, and Lydia saw he called her Esther in his thoughts--"Madame Beattie tells you she believes that Esther did this--this incredible thing." The judicial aspect fell away from him, and the last words carried only the man's natural distaste. Lydia saw now that whether she was believed or not, she was bound to be most unpopular. But she stood to her guns. "Madame Beattie knows it. Esther owned it, I told you." "Owned it to Madame Beattie?" "To Jeff, anyway. Madame Beattie says so." "Do you think for a moment she was telling you the truth?" "But that's just the kind of women they are," said Lydia, at once reckless and astute. "Esther's just the woman to take a necklace, and Madame Beattie's just the woman to tell you she's taken it." "Miss Lydia," said Choate gravely, "I'm bound to warn you in advance that you mustn't draw that kind of inference." Lydia lost her temper. It seemed to her she had been talking plain fact.