Every one was nasty the next morning. Aunt Selina declared that her
feet were frost-bitten and kept Bella rubbing them with ice water all
morning. And Jim was impossible. He refused to speak to any of us and he
watched Bella furtively, as if he suspected her of trying to get him out
of the house.
When luncheon time came around and he had shown no indication of going
to the telephone and ordering it, we had a conclave, and Max was chosen
to remind him of the hour. Jim was shut in the studio, and we waited
together in the hall while Max went up. When he came down he was
somewhat ruffled.
"He wouldn't open the door," he reported, "and when I told him it was
meal time, he said he wasn't hungry, and he didn't give a whoop about
the rest of us. He had asked us here to dinner; he hadn't proposed to
adopt us."
So we finally ordered luncheon ourselves, and about two o'clock Jim came
downstairs sheepishly, and ate what was left. Anne declared that Bella
had been scolding him in the upper hall, but I doubted it. She was never
seen to speak to him unnecessarily.
The excitement of the escape over, Mr. Harbison and I remained on terms
of armed neutrality. And Max still hunted for Anne's pearls, using them,
the men declared, as a good excuse to avoid tinkering with the furnace
or repairing the dumb waiter, which took the queerest notions, and
stopped once, half-way up from the kitchen, for an hour, with the dinner
on it. Anyhow, Max was searching the house systematically, armed with
a copy of Poe's Purloined Letter and Gaboriau's Monsieur LeCoq. He went
through the seats of the chairs with hatpins, tore up the beds, and
lifted rugs, until the house was in a state of confusion. And the next
day, the fourth, he found something--not much, but it was curious. He
had been in the studio, poking around behind the dusty pictures, with
Jimmy expostulating every time he moved anything and the rest standing
around watching him.
Max was strutting.
"We get it by elimination," he said importantly. "The pearls being
nowhere else in the house, they must be here in the studio. Three parts
of the studio having yielded nothing, they must be in the fourth. Ladies
and gentlemen, let me have your attention for one moment. I tap this
canvas with my wand--there is nothing up my sleeve. Then I prepare
to move the canvas--so. And I put my hand in the pocket of this
disreputable velvet coat, so. Behold!"
Then he gave a low exclamation and looked at something he held in his
hand. Every one stepped forward, and on his palm was the small diamond
clasp from Anne's collar!
Jimmy was apoplectic. He tried to smile, but no one else did.