These questions he could not answer, and his brain was all in a whirl when the train reached Springfield, and, with the others, he registered himself at the hotel.  Suddenly, like a gleam of lightning seen through a rift of clouds, there came back to him, with a horrible distinctness, the words the child Jerry had spoken to him that day years ago, when he had walked homeward with her through the leafy woods from the Park House, where he had been questioned so closely by Mrs. Tracy with regard to her diamonds and what he had been doing in the house on the morning of their disappearance.

’I know where those diamonds are, but I shan’t tell while there is such a fuss,’ she had said, and in his abstraction he had scarcely noticed it then, but it came back to him now with fearful significance, making him sick, and faint, and cold, although the great drops of sweat stood thickly upon his lips and under his hair, as, after the gas was lighted, he sat alone in a little reception-room opening from one of the parlors.  Did Jerrie know where they were, and had she known all the time and not spoken?  And, if so, was she not guilty as an accessory, at least in trying to shield another?  For that she took them herself he never for a moment dreamed.  It was some one else, and she knew and did not tell.  He was certain of it now, as every incident connected with her strange sickness came back to him, when she seemed to be doing penance for another’s fault.  She had called herself an accessory, and that was what she was, or rather what the world would call her, if it knew.  To him she was Jerrie, the girl he loved, and he would defend her to the bitter end, no matter how culpable she had been in keeping silence so long.

But who took them!  That was the question puzzling him so much as he sat thinking with his head bent down, and so absorbed that he did not hear a step in the adjoining room, or know that Peterkin had seated himself just where a large mirror showed him distinctly the young man in the next room, whom he recognized at once, though Harold never moved for a few moments or lifted his head.

At last, however, he unbuttoned his coat and after glancing cautiously around to make sure no one was near, he took the box from his pocket, and holding the stones to the light examined them carefully, taking in his hand first the ear-rings and then the pin, and holding them in such a way that two or three times they flashed directly in the eyes of the cruel man watching him.

‘Yes, they are Mrs. Tracy’s diamonds; there can be no mistake,’ he whispered, just as he became conscious that there was some one in the door looking at him.

Quick as thought he put the box out of sight just as Peterkin’s voice, exultant and hateful, cried out: