"Briefly," said Alston, "it was given the famous singer, as she states, by a certain Royal Personage. We are not concerned with his identity, his nationality even. But it was a historic necklace, and he'd no business to give it to her at all. There were some rather shady transactions before he could get his hands on it. And the Royal Family never ceased trying to get it back. The Royal Personage was a young man when he gave it to her, but by the time the family'd begun to exert pressure he wasn't so impetuous, and he, too, wanted it back. His marriage gave the right romantic reason, which he used. He actually asked the famous singer to return it to him, and at the same time she was approached by some sort of agent from the family who offered her a fat compensation." "It was a matter of sentiment," said Madame Beattie loftily. "You've no right to say it was a question of money. It is extremely bad taste." "She had ceased singing," said Alston. "Money meant more to her than the jewels it would have been inexpedient to display. For by that time, she didn't want to offend any royal families whatever. So she was bought off, and she gave up the necklace." "It is not true," said she. "If it was money I wanted, I could have sold it." "Oh, no, I beg your pardon. There would have been difficulties in the way of selling historic stones; besides there were so many royal personages concerned in keeping them intact. It might have been very different when the certain Royal Personage was young enough and impetuous enough to swear he stood behind you. He'd got to the point where he might even have sworn he never gave them to you." She uttered a little hoarse exclamation, a curse, Alston could believe, in whatever tongue. "Besides," he continued, "as I just said, Madame Beattie wasn't willing, on the whole, to offend her royal patrons, though she wasn't singing any longer. She had a good many favours to ask of the world, and she didn't want Europe made too hot to hold her." He paused to rest a moment from his thankless task, and they looked at each other calmly, yet quite recognising they were at grips. "You forget," said she, "that I have the necklace at this moment in my possession. You have seen it and handled it." "No," said Alston, "I have never seen the necklace. Nobody has seen it on this side the water. When you came here years ago and got Jeff into difficulties you brought another necklace, a spurious one, paste, stage jewels, I daresay, and none of us were clever enough to know the difference. You said it was the Beattie necklace, and Esther was hypnotised and--" "And stole it," Madame Beattie put in, with a real enjoyment now. "And Jeff was paralysed by loving Esther so much that he didn't look into it. And as soon as he was out of prison you came here and hypnotised us all over again. But it's not the necklace." Madame Beattie put back her head and burst into hoarse and perfectly spontaneous laughter.