“Not that, please,” she protested, and fell to whistling softly again, her chin in her hands.  “I can’t sing,” she said, to break an awkward pause, “and so, when I’m fidgety, or have something on my mind, I whistle.  I hope you don’t dislike it?”

“I love it,” I asserted warmly.  I did; when she pursed her lips like that I was mad to kiss them.

“I saw you—­at the station,” she said, suddenly.  “You—­you were in a hurry to go.”  I did not say anything, and after a pause she drew a long breath.  “Men are queer, aren’t they?” she said, and fell to whistling again.

After a while she sat up as if she had made a resolution.  “I am going to confess something,” she announced suddenly.  “You said, you know, that you had ordered all this for something you—­you wanted to say to me.  But the fact is, I fixed it all—­came here, I mean, because—­I knew you would come, and I had something to tell you.  It was such a miserable thing I—­needed the accessories to help me out.”

“I don’t want to hear anything that distresses you to tell,” I assured her.  “I didn’t come here to force your confidence, Alison.  I came because I couldn’t help it.”  She did not object to my use of her name.

“Have you found—­your papers?” she asked, looking directly at me for almost the first time.

“Not yet.  We hope to.”

“The—­police have not interfered with you?”

“They haven’t had any opportunity,” I equivocated.  “You needn’t distress yourself about that, anyhow.”

“But I do.  I wonder why you still believe in me?  Nobody else does.”

“I wonder,” I repeated, “why I do!”

“If you produce Harry Sullivan,” she was saying, partly to herself, “and if you could connect him with Mr. Bronson, and get a full account of why he was on the train, and all that, it—­it would help, wouldn’t it?”

I acknowledged that it would.  Now that the whole truth was almost in my possession, I was stricken with the old cowardice.  I did not want to know what she might tell me.  The yellow line on the horizon, where the moon was coming up, was a broken bit of golden chain:  my heel in the sand was again pressed on a woman’s yielding fingers:  I pulled myself together with a jerk.

“In order that what you might tell me may help me, if it will,” I said constrainedly, “it would be necessary, perhaps, that you tell it to the police.  Since they have found the end of the necklace—­”

“The end of the necklace!” she repeated slowly.  “What about the end of the necklace?”

I stared at her.  “Don’t you remember”—­I leaned forward—­“the end of the cameo necklace, the part that was broken off, and was found in the black sealskin bag, stained with—­with blood?”

“Blood,” she said dully.  “You mean that you found the broken end?  And then—­you had my gold pocket-book, and you saw the necklace in it, and you—­must have thought—­”