“For an actress there’s no such word as ‘cannot,’” she said bitterly.  “I could play a part to the finish, and crawl off the stage to die the next instant; yet no one would have guessed that I was dying.  I have no understudy.  What use to have one?  What audience would stop in the theatre after an announcement that their Maxine’s understudy would take her place?  Every man and woman would walk out and get his money back.  No; for the sake of the man I love better than my life, or twenty lives—­the man I’ve either saved or ruined—­I’ll play tonight, if I go mad or kill myself to-morrow.  Don’t ‘think quietly,’ Ivor.  Think out aloud, and let me follow the workings of your mind.  We may help each other, so.  Let us go over together everything that happened to you from the minute you took the letter-case from the Foreign Secretary up to the minute I came into this room.”

I obeyed, beginning at the very beginning and telling her all, except the part that had to do with Diana Forrest.  She had no concern in that.  I told her how I had slept with the green letter-case under my pillow, and had waked to feel and look for it once or twice an hour.  How when morning came I had been late in getting to the train:  how I had struggled with the two men who tried to keep me out of the reserved compartment into which they were intruding.  How the man who had a right to it, after wishing to prevent my entering, helped me in the end, rather than be alone with the pair who had forced themselves upon him.  How he had stumbled almost into my arms in a panic, during the confusion after the false alarm on the boat’s gangway.  How he had walked beside me and seemed on the point of speaking, later, in the Gare du Nord.  How I had avoided and lost sight of him; but how I had many times covertly touched my pocket to be sure that, through all, the letter-case was still safe there.

Maxine grew calmer, though not, I think, more hopeful as I talked; and at last she folded up the diamonds neatly in the red case, which she gave to me.  “Put that into the same pocket,” she said, “and then pass your hand over your coat, as you did often before.  Now, does it feel exactly as if it were the green letter-case with which you started out?”

“Yes, I think it does,” I answered, doubtfully.  “I’m afraid I shouldn’t know the difference.  This may be a little thicker than the other, but—­I can’t be sure.  And, you see, I never once had a chance to unbutton my coat and look at the thing I had in this inner pocket.  It would have attracted too much attention to risk that; and as a matter of fact, I was especially warned not to do it.  I could trust only to the touch.  But even granting that, by a skill almost clever enough for sleight of hand—­a skill which only the smartest pickpocket in Europe could possess—­why should a thief who had stolen my letter-case give me instead a string of diamonds worth many thousands of pounds?  If he wanted to put something into my pocket of much the same size and shape as the thing he stole, so that I shouldn’t suspect my loss, why didn’t he slip in the red case empty, instead of containing the necklace?”