her hands upon it. She was
pulled away more or less roughly by the man called Reggie, but she did
not seem to notice it.

"Am I mad or dreaming?" she said as she pressed her hands to her
forehead. "I could have sworn that I heard a voice calling me, a
voice----"

"All nonsense," said Sartoris hoarsely. "You are overstrung, and your
imagination is too real for you. Did any of the rest of you hear a
voice?"

The other two denied that they had heard anything. Beatrice broke out
scornfully----

"It is a lie," she said. "You all heard it. Everybody heard it. If not,
why are you all so white, and why do you all look so curiously at one
another?"

It was quite true, and Sartoris had no reply for the moment. He seemed
to be struggling to regain his lost self-possession. Then he glanced at
the man called Reggie, who shrugged his shoulders. Sartoris was himself
again by this time.

"It was certainly an effect of the imagination," he cried. "Let us talk
of other things. My dear young lady, my friends here have been good
enough to betray the fact that you have a lot of valuable diamonds in
your pocket. Is that a fact?"

Beatrice scorned to lie, and now in any case it would have been useless.
She looked from one to the other and wondered what had become of
Berrington. Berrington was listening outside the door and feeling that
the time for him to interfere was close at hand.

"It is exactly as these people say," Beatrice admitted.

"It is very good of them to take all this trouble," Sartoris said in a
sulky voice. "Because of those stones in your pocket they are here
to-night. They followed you here, because they are both lovers of that
kind of thing. Out of purely disinterested motives, they had made up
their minds not to tell me, but a little indiscretion on the part of my
fair lady prevented that silent policy from becoming a success."

"What's all this about?" Cora asked uneasily.

"Why ask?" Sartoris said with contempt. "So that was your game, eh? Fill
your own pockets and leave the rest of us to look after ourselves. Go
off together and try the air of South America once more, you reptiles!"

The other two said nothing. They had a proper respect for the keen
intelligence of Carl Sartoris, and they knew that he had found them out.
There was a queer gleam in his eyes.

"We will have a friendly discussion on the ethics of the case some other
time," he said with an ominous frown. "Meanwhile I think you can leave
th