The Ripening Rubies

“THE plain fact is,” said Lady Faber, “we are entertaining thieves. It positively makes me shudder to look at my own guests, and to think that some of them are criminals.”

We stood together in the conservatory of her house in Portman Square, looking down upon a brilliant ball-room, upon a glow of colour, and the radiance of unnumbered gems. She had taken me aside after the fourth waltz to tell me that her famous belt of rubies had been shorn of one of its finest pendants; and she showed me beyond possibility of dispute that the loss was no accident, but another of those amazing thefts which startled London so frequently during the season of 1893. Nor was hers the only case. Though I had been in her house but an hour, complaints from other sources had reached me. The Countess of Dunholme had lost a crescent brooch of brilliants; Mrs. Kenningham-Hardy had missed a spray of pearls and turquoise; Lady Hallingham made mention of an emerald locket which was gone, as she thought, from her necklace; though, as she confessed with a truly feminine doubt, she was not positive that her maid had given it to her. And these misfortunes, being capped by the abstraction of Lady Faber’s pendant, compelled me to believe that of all the startling stories of thefts which the season had known the story of this dance would be the most remarkable.

These things and many more came to my mind as I held the mutilated belt in my hand and examined the fracture, while my hostess stood, with an angry flush upon her face, waiting for my verdict. A moment’s inspection of the bauble revealed to me at once its exceeding value, and the means whereby a pendant of it had been snatched.

“If you will look closely,” said I, “you will see that the gold chain here has been cut with a pair of scissors. As we don’t know the name of the person who used them, we may describe them as pickpocket’s scissors.”