As Kennedy hung up the receiver, his face wore a peculiar look.  “It was Mrs. Moulton,” he blurted out.  “She thinks that her husband has found out that the necklace is paste.”

“How?” I asked.

“The paste replica is gone from her wall safe in the Deluxe.”

I turned, startled at the information.  Even Kennedy himself was perplexed at the sudden succession of events.  I had nothing to say.

Evidently, however, his rule was when in doubt play a trump, for, twenty minutes later found us in the office of Lynn Moulton, the famous corporation lawyer, in Wall Street.

Moulton was a handsome man of past fifty with a youthful face against his iron gray hair and mustache, well dressed, genial, a man who seemed keenly in love with the good things of life.

“It is rumored,” began Kennedy, “that an attempt was made on your safe here at the office last night.”

“Yes,” he admitted, taking off his glasses and polishing them carefully.  “I suppose there is no need of concealment, especially as I hear that a somewhat similar attempt was made on the safe of my friend Herman Schloss in Maiden Lane.”

“You lost nothing?”

Moulton put his glasses on and looked Kennedy in the face frankly.

“Nothing, fortunately,” he said, then went on slowly.  “You see, in my later years, I have been something of a collector of precious stones myself.  I don’t wear them, but I have always taken the keenest pleasure in owning them and when I was married it gave me a great deal more pleasure to have them set in rings, pendants, tiaras, necklaces, and other forms for my wife.”

He had risen, with the air of a busy man who had given the subject all the consideration he could afford and whose work proceeded almost by schedule.  “This morning I found my safe tampered with, but, as I said, fortunately something must have scared off the burglars.”

He bowed us out politely.  What was the explanation, I wondered.  It seemed, on the face of things, that Antoinette Moulton feared her husband.  Did he know something else already, and did she know he knew?  To all appearances he took it very calmly, if he did know.  Perhaps that was what she feared, his very calmness.

“I must see Mrs. Moulton again,” remarked Kennedy, as we left.

The Moultons lived, we found, in one of the largest suites of a new apartment hotel, the Deluxe, and in spite of the fact that our arrival had been announced some minutes before we saw Mrs. Moulton, it was evident that she had been crying hysterically over the loss of the paste jewels and what it implied.

“I missed it this morning, after my return from seeing you,” she replied in answer to Craig’s inquiry, then added, wide-eyed with alarm, “What shall I do?  He must have opened the wall safe and found the replica.  I don’t dare ask him point-blank.”

“Are you sure he did it?” asked Kennedy, more, I felt, for its moral effect on her than through any doubt in his own mind.