"Don't mind obliging a gentleman if I can, and if you want to speak to your aunt you may, seein' it's close by, and it ain't a warrant case. But I shall have to be with you, and you'll have to come with me after, whatever she says." I was in an awful position, and I realized it fully. Here I was with that facsimile brooch in my possession, and if it were found on me at the police-station, of course, it would be taken for the genuine article, and regarded as a positive proof that I was the thief. In the few steps to Aunt Sarah's house I saw and understood now what the police had been at. I was the person they had suspected from the beginning. Their pretence of dropping the inquiry was a mere device to throw me off my ground and lead me to betray myself by my movements. And I had been watched frequenting shady second-hand jewellery shops in Soho! And, no doubt I had been seen in the low eating-house where I might be supposed to be leaving messages for criminal associates! It was hideous. On the one side there was the chance of ruin and imprisonment for theft, and on the other the scarcely less terrible one of estranging Aunt Sarah for ever by confessing my miserable deception. Plainly I had only one way of safety--to brazen out my story of the recovery of the brooch. I was bitterly sorry, now, that I had coloured the story, so far as it had gone, quite so boldly. It had gone a good way, too, for I had been obliged to add something to it each time I saw Aunt Sarah during my operations. But I must lie through stone walls now. I scarcely remember what Aunt Sarah said when she was told I was under arrest for the robbery. I know she broke a drawing-room chair, and had to be dragged off the floor on to the sofa by the detective and myself. But she got her speech pretty soon, and protested valiantly. It was a shameful outrage, she proclaimed, and the police were incapable fools. "While you've been doing nothing," she said, "my dear nephew has traced out the jewels and--and----" "I've got the brooch, aunt!" I cried, for this seemed the dramatic moment. And I put it in her hand. "I must have that, please," the detective interposed. "Do you identify it?" "Identify it?" exclaimed Aunt Sarah, rapturously. "Of course I identify it! I'd know my Uncle Joseph's brooch among ten thousand! And his initials and his hair and all! Identify it, indeed! I should think so! And did you get it from Bludgeoning Bill himself, Clement, my dear?" Now, "Bludgeoning Bill" was the name I had given the chief ruffian of my story; rather a striking sort of name, I fancied. So I said, "Yes--yes. That's the name he's known by--among his intimates, of course. The police" (I had a vague idea of hedging, as far as possible, with the detective)--"the police only know his--his other names, I believe. A--a very dangerous sort of person!" "And did you have much of a struggle with him?" pursued Aunt Sarah, hanging on my words.