She seemed to ask how a woman could doubt the identity of a trinket she had clasped about her neck a thousand times, and pored over while it lay in some hidden nest. "Ask her," said Madame Beattie, in her tiniest lisp, "if the necklace is hers." There flashed into Alston Choate's mind the picture of Lydia, as she came to his office that day in the early summer, to bring her childish accusation against Esther. The incident had been neatly pigeonholed, but only as it affected Anne. It could not affect Esther, he had known then, with a leap at certainty measured by his belief in her. The belief had been big enough to offset all possible evidence. "Ask her," said Madame Beattie, with relish, "where she got it." When Esther had cried a little at the beginning of the interview, the low lamenting had moved him beyond hope of endurance, and he had wondered what he could do if she kept on crying. But now she drew herself up and looked, not at him, but at Madame Beattie. "How dare you?" she said, in a low tone, not convincingly to the ears of those who had heard it said better on the stage, yet with a reproving passion adequate to the case. But Alston asked no further questions. Madame Beattie went amicably on. "Mr. Choate, this matter of the necklace is a family affair. Why don't you run away and let Jeffrey and his wife--and me, you know--let us settle it?" Alston, dismissed, forgot he had been summoned and that Esther might be still depending on him. He turned about to the door, but she recalled him. "Don't go," she said. The words were all in one breath. "Don't go far. I am afraid." He hesitated, and Jeffrey said equably but still with a grim amusement: "I think you'd better go." So he went out of the room and Esther was left between her two inquisitors. XXIX That she did look upon Jeff as her tormentor he could see. She took a darting step to the door, but he was closing it. "Wait a minute," he said. "There are one or two things we've got to get at. Where did you find the necklace?" She met his look immovably, in the softest obstinacy. It smote him like a blow. There was something implacable in it, too, an aversion almost as fierce as hate. "This is the necklace," he went on. "It was lost, you know. Where did you find it, Esther?" But suddenly Esther remembered she had a counter charge to make. "You have broken into this house," she said, "and taken it. If it is Aunt Patricia's, you have taken it from her." "No," said Aunt Patricia easily, "it isn't altogether mine. Jeff made me a payment on it a good many years ago." Esther turned upon her. "He paid you for it? When?" "He paid me something," said Madame Beattie. "Not the value of the necklace. That was when you stole it, Esther. He meant to pay me the full value. He will, in time. But he paid me what he could to keep you from being found out. Hush money, Esther."