“He certainly doesn’t want to get anything out of you,” I answered.

That evening at dinner a queer little episode happened.  The man with the eyebrows began talking to me across the table in his usual fashion, full of his wearisome concession on the Upper Amazons.  I was trying to squash him as politely as possible, when I caught Amelia’s eye.  Her look amused me.  She was engaged in making signals to Charles at her side to observe the little curate’s curious sleeve-links.  I glanced at them, and saw at once they were a singular possession for so unobtrusive a person.  They consisted each of a short gold bar for one arm of the link, fastened by a tiny chain of the same material to what seemed to my tolerably experienced eye—­a first-rate diamond.  Pretty big diamonds, too, and of remarkable shape, brilliancy, and cutting.  In a moment I knew what Amelia meant.  She owned a diamond rivière, said to be of Indian origin, but short by two stones for the circumference of her tolerably ample neck.  Now, she had long been wanting two diamonds like these to match her set; but owing to the unusual shape and antiquated cutting of her own gems, she had never been able to complete the necklet, at least without removing an extravagant amount from a much larger stone of the first water.

The Scotch lassie’s eyes caught Amelia’s at the same time, and she broke into a pretty smile of good-humoured amusement.  “Taken in another person, Dick, dear!” she exclaimed, in her breezy way, turning to her husband.  “Lady Vandrift is observing your diamond sleeve-links.”

“They’re very fine gems,” Amelia observed incautiously. (A most unwise admission if she desired to buy them.)

But the pleasant little curate was too transparently simple a soul to take advantage of her slip of judgment.  “They are good stones,” he replied; “very good stones—­considering.  They’re not diamonds at all, to tell you the truth.  They’re best old-fashioned Oriental paste.  My great-grandfather bought them, after the siege of Seringapatam, for a few rupees, from a Sepoy who had looted them from Tippoo Sultan’s palace.  He thought, like you, he had got a good thing.  But it turned out, when they came to be examined by experts, they were only paste—­very wonderful paste; it is supposed they had even imposed upon Tippoo himself, so fine is the imitation.  But they are worth—­well, say, fifty shillings at the utmost.”

While he spoke Charles looked at Amelia, and Amelia looked at Charles.  Their eyes spoke volumes.  The rivière was also supposed to have come from Tippoo’s collection.  Both drew at once an identical conclusion.  These were two of the same stones, very likely torn apart and disengaged from the rest in the mêlée at the capture of the Indian palace.

“Can you take them off?” Sir Charles asked blandly.  He spoke in the tone that indicates business.

“Certainly,” the little curate answered, smiling.  “I’m accustomed to taking them off.  They’re always noticed.  They’ve been kept in the family ever since the siege, as a sort of valueless heirloom, for the sake of the picturesqueness of the story, you know; and nobody ever sees them without asking, as you do, to examine them closely.  They deceive even experts at first.  But they’re paste, all the same; unmitigated Oriental paste, for all that.”