So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o’clock Jim came downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left.  Anne declared that Bella had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it.  She was never seen to speak to him unnecessarily.

The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms of armed neutrality.  And Max still hunted for Anne’s pearls, using them, the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner on it.  Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with a copy of Poe’s Purloined Letter and Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq.  He went through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion.  And the next day, the fourth, he found something—­not much, but it was curious.  He had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing around watching him.

Max was strutting.

“We get it by elimination,” he said importantly.  “The pearls being nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio.  Three parts of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth.  Ladies and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment.  I tap this canvas with my wand—­there is nothing up my sleeve.  Then I prepare to move the canvas—­so.  And I put my hand in the pocket of this disreputable velvet coat, so.  Behold!”

Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his hand.  Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond clasp from Anne’s collar!

Jimmy was apoplectic.  He tried to smile, but no one else did.

“Well, I’ll be flabbergasted!” he said.  “I say, you people, you don’t think for a minute that I put that thing there?  Why, I haven’t worn that coat for a month.  It’s—­it’s a trick of yours, Max.”

But Max shook his head; he looked stupefied, and stood gazing from the clasp to the pocket of the old painting coat.  Betty dropped on a folding stool, that promptly collapsed with her and created a welcome diversion, while Anne pounced on the clasp greedily, with a little cry.

“We will find it all now,” she said excitedly.  “Did you look in the other pockets, Max?”

Then, for the first time, I was conscious of an air of constraint among the men.  Dallas was whistling softly, and Mr. Harbison, having rescued Betty, was standing silent and aloof, watching the scene with non-committal eyes.  It was Max who spoke first, after a hurried inventory of the other pockets.

“Nothing else,” he said constrainedly.  “I’ll move the rest of the canvases.”

But Jim interfered, to every one’s surprise.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you, Max.  There’s nothing back there.  I had ’em out yesterday.”  He was quite pale.