“I’m not a relative of anybody’s butler!”

“You say you are not.  How do I know?  I—­I will make you an offer.  I will give you one last chance.  If you will return to me the jewels that my butler took—­”

“Good heavens, madam!  Do you really take me for a professional burglar?”

“How can I help it?” she said indignantly.  “Look at your suit case full of lanterns and masks—­full of marble, too!”

Speechless, he stared at the burglar’s kit.

“I am sorry—­” Her voice had altered again to a tremulous sweetness.  “I can’t help feeling sorry for you.  You do not seem to be hardened; your voice and manner are not characteristically criminal.  I—­I can’t see your face very clearly, but it does not seem to be a brutally inhuman face—­”

An awful desire to laugh seized Kerns; he struggled against it; hysteria lay that way; and he covered his face with both hands and pinched himself.

She probably mistook the action for the emotion of shame and despair born of bitter grief; perhaps of terror of the law.  It frightened her a little, but pity dominated.  She could scarcely endure to do what she must do.

“This is dreadful, dreadful!” she faltered.  “If you only would give me back my jewels—­”

Sounds, hastily smothered, escaped him.  She believed them to be groans, and it made her slightly faint.

“I—­I’ve simply got to telephone for the police,” she said pityingly.  “I must ask you to sit down there and wait—­there is a chair.  Sit there—­and please don’t move, for I—­this has unnerved me—­I am not accustomed to doing cruel things; and if you should move too quickly or attempt to run away I feel certain that this pistol would explode.”

“Are you going to telephone?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

She backed away, cautiously, pistol menacing him, reached for the receiver, and waited for Central.  She waited a long time before she realized that the telephone as well as the electric light was out of commission.

“Did you cut all these wires?” she demanded angrily.

“I?  What wires?”

She reached out and pressed the electric button which should have rung a bell in her maid’s bedroom on the top floor.  She kept her finger on the button for ten minutes.  It was useless.

“You laid deliberate plans to rob this house,” she said, her cheeks pink with indignation.  “I am not a bit sorry for you.  I shall not let you go!  I shall sit here until somebody comes to my assistance, if I have to sit here for weeks and weeks!”

“If you’d let me telephone to my club—­” he began.

“Your club!  You are very plausible.  You didn’t offer to call up any club until you found that the telephone was not working!”

He thought a moment.  “I don’t suppose you would trust me to go out and get a policeman?”

“Certainly not.”

“Or go into the front room and open a window and summon some passer-by?”