it was eight in the evening when the man sat down opposite the woman in the third inn they visited—­it was no better than a drinking shop near the quays.  For half an hour they sat, and there was that in their air that made them observed.  Suddenly the man crossed over to the woman and whispered in her ear.  She started, crying low yet audibly, “You lie!” But he spoke to her again; and then she rose and paid her score and walked out of the inn on to the quays, followed by her unrelenting attendant.  It was dark now, or quite dusk; and a loiterer at the door distinguished their figures among the passing crowd but for a few yards:  then they disappeared; and none was found who had seen them again, either under cover or in the open air, that night.

And for my part, I like not to think how the night passed for that wretched old woman; for at some hour and in some place, near by the water, the man found her alone, and ran his prey to the ground before the bloodhounds that were on his track could come up with them.

Indeed he almost won safety, or at least respite; for the ship was already moving when she was boarded by the police, who, searching high and low, came at last on the spare man with the red whiskers; these an officer rudely plucked off and the fair wig with them, and called the prisoner by the name of Pinceau.  The little man made one rush with a knife, and, foiled in that, another for the side of the vessel.  But his efforts were useless.  He was handcuffed and led on shore.  And when he was searched, the stones which had gone to compose the great treasure of the family of Saint-Maclou—­the Cardinal’s Necklace—­were found hidden here and there about him; but the setting was gone.

And the woman?  Let me say it briefly.  Great were her sins, and not the greatest of them was the theft of the Cardinal’s Necklace.  Yet the greater that she took in hand to do was happily thwarted; and I pray that she found mercy when the deep dark waters of the harbor swallowed her on that night, and gave back her body to a shameful burial.

* * * * *

In the quiet convent by the shores of the bay the wind of the world, with its burden of sin and sorrow, blows faintly and with tempered force:  the talk of idle, eager tongues cannot break across the comforting of kind voices and the sweet strains of quiet worship.  Raymond Pinceau was dead, and Jacques Bontet condemned to lifelong penal servitude; and the world had ceased to talk of the story that had been revealed at the trial of these men, and—­what the world loved even more to discuss—­of how much of the story had not been revealed.