“Well, then---- Oh, I say, you don’t think they are just paste or anything like that?”
“No, sir. These are genuine pearls and extremely valuable.”
“Well, then, dash it, I’m on velvet. Absolutely reclining on the good old plush! I may be down a hundred quid but I’m up a jolly good string of pearls. Am I right or wrong?”
“Hardly that, sir. I think that you will have to restore the pearls.”
“What! To Sid? Not while I have my physique!”
“It was all over the hotel an hour ago that Mrs. Gregson’s pearls had been abstracted. I was speaking to Mrs. Gregson’s maid shortly before you came in and she informed me that the manager of the hotel is now in Mrs. Gregson’s suite.”
“So I should be disposed to imagine, sir.”
The situation was beginning to unfold before me.
“I’ll go and give them back to her, eh? It’ll put me one up, what?”
“Precisely, sir. And, if I may make the suggestion, I think it might be judicious to stress the fact that they were stolen by----”
“Great Scott! By the dashed girl she was hounding me on to marry, by Jove!”
“Jeeves,” I said, “this is going to be the biggest score off my jolly old relative that has ever occurred in the world’s history.”
“Keep her quiet for a bit, what? Make her stop snootering me for a while?”
Long before I reached Aunt Agatha’s lair I could tell that the hunt was up. Divers chappies in hotel uniform and not a few chambermaids of sorts were hanging about in the corridor, and through the panels I could hear a mixed assortment of voices, with Aunt Agatha’s topping the lot. I knocked but no one took any notice, so I trickled in. Among those present I noticed a chambermaid in hysterics, Aunt Agatha with her hair bristling, and the whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, the hotel manager fellow.
Aunt Agatha shooshed me away. No welcoming smile for Bertram.
“Don’t bother me now, Bertie,” she snapped, looking at me as if I were more or less the last straw.
“Pearls? Pearls? Pearls?” I said. “No, really? Dashed annoying. Where did you see them last?”
“What does it matter where I saw them last? They have been stolen.”
Here Wilfred the Whisker King, who seemed to have been taking a rest between rounds, stepped into the ring again and began to talk rapidly in French. Cut to the quick he seemed. The chambermaid whooped in the corner.