I took the pendant out. It was a beauty; it could not be a present from the Sterndales, from either the sister or the brother. They must have known that I could not accept such a gift as that from strangers. And then, what a queer way of making a present – and such a present!
As I looked at it I began to have a very uncomfortable feeling that I had seen it before, or one very like it, on someone in the house. My head, or my brain, or something, seemed to be so muddled that at the moment I could not think who that someone was. I had washed and tidied myself before I decided that I would go down with the pendant in my hand and, at the risk of no matter what misunderstanding, ask Miss Sterndale what she meant by putting it there. So, when I had got my unruly hair into something like order, downstairs I went, and rushed into the lounge with so much impetuosity that I all but cannoned against Miss Goodridge, who was coming out.
‘Good gracious, child!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do look where you are going. You almost knocked me over.’
The instant I saw her, and she said that, I remembered – I knew whom I had seen wearing that diamond pendant which I was holding tightly clasped in the palm of my hand. It was the person whom I had almost knocked over, Miss Goodridge herself – of course! One of the persons in the hotel whom, so far as I knew anything of them, I liked least. Miss Goodridge was a tall, angular person of perhaps quite thirty-five, who dressed and carried herself as if she were still a girl. She had been most unpleasant to me. I had no idea what I had done or said to cause her annoyance, but I had a feeling that she disliked me, and was at no pains to conceal the fact. The sight of her, and the thought that I had nearly knocked her over, quite drove the sense out of my head.
‘Oh, Miss Goodridge!’ I exclaimed, rather fatuously. ‘You look as if something had happened.’
‘Something has happened,’ she replied. ‘There’s a thief in the house. I have been robbed. Someone has stolen my pendant – my diamond pendant.’
Someone had stolen her diamond pendant! I do not know if the temperature changed all at once, but I do know that a chill went all over me. Was that the explanation? Could it possibly be – I did not care to carry even my thought to a logical finish. I stood there as if I were moonstruck, with Miss Goodridge looking at me with angry eyes.
‘What is the matter with the child?’ she asked. ‘I did not know you dark-skinned girls could blush, but I declare you’ve gone as red as a lobster.’
I do not know if she thought that lobsters were red before they were boiled. I tried to explain, to say what I wanted to say, but I appeared to be tongue-tied.
‘Can’t you speak?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t glare at me as if you’d committed a murder. Anyone would think that you had been robbed instead of me. I suppose you haven’t stolen my pendant?’
She drew her bow at a venture, but her arrow hit the mark.
‘Oh, Miss Goodridge!’ I repeated. It seemed to be all I could say.
She put her hand upon my shoulder.
‘What is the matter with the girl? You young wretch! Have you been playing any tricks with that pendant of mine?’
‘I – I found it,’ I stammered. I held out to her my open hand with the pendant on the palm.
‘You – you found it? Found what?’ She looked at me and then at my outstretched hand. ‘My pendant! She’s got my pendant!’ She snatched it from me. ‘You – you young – thief! And you have the insolence to pretend you found it!’
‘I did find it – I found it in my bedroom.’
‘Did you really? Of all the assurance! I’ve always felt that you were the kind of creature with whom the less one had to do the better, but I never credited you with a taste for this sort of thing. Get out of my way! Don’t you ever dare to speak to me again.’
She did not wait for me to get out of her way; she gave me a violent push and rushed right past me. It was a polished floor; if I had not come in contact with a big armchair I should have tumbled on to it. My feelings when I was left alone in the lounge were not enviable. At seventeen, even if one thinks oneself grown up, one is still only a child, and I was a stranger in a strange land, without a friend in all that great hotel, without a soul to advise me. Still, as I knew that I was absolutely and entirely innocent, I did not intend to behave as if I were guilty. I went up to my room again and dressed for dinner. I told myself over and over again as I performed my simple toilette that I would make Miss Goodridge eat her words before she had done, though at that moment I had not the faintest notion how I was going to do it.
That was a horrid dinner – not from the culinary, but from my point of view. If the dinner was horrid, in the lounge afterwards it was worse. Miss Sterndale actually had the audacity to come
