The athletic harlequin swung him about like a sack or twisted or tossed him like an Indian club; all the time to the most maddeningly ludicrous tunes from the piano.  When the harlequin heaved the comic constable heavily off the floor the clown played “I arise from dreams of thee.”  When he shuffled him across his back, “With my bundle on my shoulder,” and when the harlequin finally let fall the policeman with a most convincing thud, the lunatic at the instrument struck into a jingling measure with some words which are still believed to have been, “I sent a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it.”

At about this limit of mental anarchy Father Brown’s view was obscured altogether; for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height and thrust his hands savagely into all his pockets.  Then he sat down nervously, still fumbling, and then stood up again.  For an instant it seemed seriously likely that he would stride across the footlights; then he turned a glare at the clown playing the piano; and then he burst in silence out of the room.

The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not inelegant dance of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious foe.  With real though rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards out of the door into the garden, which was full of moonlight and stillness.  The vamped dress of silver paper and paste, which had been too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more magical and silvery as it danced away under a brilliant moon.  The audience was closing in with a cataract of applause, when Brown felt his arm abruptly touched, and he was asked in a whisper to come into the colonel’s study.

He followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study.  There sat Colonel Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia.  Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance of panic.

“This is a very painful matter, Father Brown,” said Adams.  “The truth is, those diamonds we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from my friend’s tail-coat pocket.  And as you—­”

“As I,” supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, “was sitting just behind him—­”

“Nothing of the sort shall be suggested,” said Colonel Adams, with a firm look at Fischer, which rather implied that some such thing had been suggested.  “I only ask you to give me the assistance that any gentleman might give.”

“Which is turning out his pockets,” said Father Brown, and proceeded to do so, displaying seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver crucifix, a small breviary, and a stick of chocolate.

The colonel looked at him long, and then said, “Do you know, I should like to see the inside of your head more than the inside of your pockets.  My daughter is one of your people, I know; well, she has lately—­” and he stopped.