"Don't you know more about them than that?" I asked her.
"N-no," she said weakly, darting a timid look at her husband's face, while he, paying no attention to her, stared levelly at me.
"When did they leave?" I asked.
"Early this morning," Leggett told me. "They were staying at one of the hotels―I don't know which―and Gabrielle spent the night with them, so they could make an early start."
I had enough of the Harpers.
"Did any of you have any dealings with Upton before this affair?" I asked.
"No."
There were other questions to which I would have liked answers, but the sort of replies he gave me answered nothing. I was tempted to tell him what I thought of him, but there was no profit in that. I stood up.
He got on his feet, smiling apologetically, and said:
"I'm sorry to have caused the insurance company all this trouble and expense. After all, the diamonds were probably lost because of my carelessness in not safeguarding them. I should like your opinion: do you really think I should accept responsibility for the loss and make it good?"
"I think you should," I replied, "but that won't stop the investigation."
Mrs. Leggett put her handkerchief to her mouth quickly. Leggett said calmly:
"Thanks. I'll have to think it over."
On my way back to the Agency I dropped in on Owen Fitzstephan for a half-hour visit. He was writing, he told me, an article for the Psychopathological Review, or something of the sort, condemning the hypothesis of an unconscious or subconscious mind as a snare and delusion, a pitfall for the unwary and a set of false whiskers for the charlatan, a gap in psychology's roof that made it impossible, or nearly, for the sound scientist to smoke out such faddists as, for example, the psychoanalyst and the behaviorist. He went on like that for ten minutes or more before he came back to the United States with:
"How are you getting along with the problem of the elusive diamonds?"
"This way and that way," I said, and told him all I had done and learned so far.
"You've certainly," he complimented me when I had finished, "got it all as tangled and confused as possible."
"It'll be worse before it's better," I predicted. "I'd like to have ten minutes alone with Mrs. Leggett. Away from her husband, I imagine things could be got out of her. Could you do anything with her?"
"I'll try. Suppose I go out there tomorrow afternoon, to borrow a book―Waite's Rosy Cross will do it. They know I'm interested in that sort of stuff. He will be working in the laboratory and I'll insist on not disturbing him, and perhaps I can get something from her, though it'll have to be in a casual, offhand way."
I thanked him, returned to the Agency, and spent most of the afternoon putting my findings on paper and trying to fit them together in some sort of order. Eric Collinson phoned twice to ask if I had found his Gabrielle. Neither Mickey Linehan nor Al Mason sent in any report. At six o'clock I called it a day.
V
The following day brought happenings.
Early in the morning there was a telegram from our New York branch. Decoded, it read:
