Free Rolling Stone by Patricia Wentworth Page B

just there on my dressing-table, and once pearls are gone you can never trace them—you’ve only got to cut the string, and of course no one can swear to them—and I don’t really think I could bear it.”
    She shut her bedroom door upon the two of them and went across to the dressing-table. The pearls lay there in a heap just as Terry had dropped them down in the darkness and the fear of the night which had gone. The sun was shining in at the windows now. It showed up the veins of Emily’s thin hands, and it showed up the sheen on the pearls. They really were too beautiful. Emily looked down at them.
    â€œJames gave them to me when our little boy was born. It’s all gone, you know.”
    Terry’s eyes stung. She said,
    â€œOh, no, darling!”
    Emily shook her head.
    â€œHe stopped loving me a long time ago. I shouldn’t like the pearls to go too.”
    Terry kissed her and ran out of the room.
    All through breakfast she was wondering what she was going to do. She had never had a secret before, not one that mattered, and this one might be going to matter terribly. Norah Margesson had taken Emily Cresswell’s pearls and given them to a man who was waiting at the foot of the terrace. Norah had called him Jimmy, and he was waiting there for the pearls.… Was he? Of course he was. And if it hadn’t been for Terry Clive, he would have got away with them, and poor darling Emily would never have seen them again, because she was quite right—you can’t trace pearls.
    Terry had saved them and put them back. And then someone had cut the Turner from its frame and got away with it. Well, what did Terry know about that?
    She sat at the breakfast table between Joseph Applegarth and Fabian Roxley, and drank Barnes’s admirable coffee, and thought miserably about what she knew. She had taken the pearls and put them down on Emily’s dressing-table. And then she had gone into her own room, but she hadn’t been able to sleep. She really had tried, but it was no good at all. She had tried for quite a long time, but it wasn’t any good, so she had gone and looked out of the window again.
    Why had she done it? Oh, why, why, why had she done it?
    Fabian Roxley said, “Terry, you look like a ghost,” and something shuddered inside her, because that had been her own thought. And ghosts walk in the night .
    She made a gallant attempt at an impudent grin and said,
    â€œNo time to make up—that’s all. The natural face isn’t too good, is it? The old lady I was telling you about last night is always saying, ‘But, my dear, why can’t you girls just leave yourselves to nature?’ So if I go and see her like this, she’ll know.”
    On her other side, Mr. Applegarth chuckled.
    â€œWe used to say ‘As pretty as paint’ when I was a young man, but a girl couldn’t paint then unless she was going in for private theatricals. I remember my sister taking a poppy out of her Sunday hat and rubbing her cheeks with it before she went to a dance, and my mother made her go upstairs and wash her face with soap and water. She’s got granddaughters now—she’s older than I—and last time I saw the eldest one she’d got lips the colour of orange-peel, and her eyebrows plucked, and stuff on her eyelashes.” He made a comical grimace. “Well, I don’t like it, I must say, but I suppose that shows I’m getting on.”
    â€œPlucked eyebrows have gone out,” said Norah Margesson. Her own had never needed plucking. They grew in a fine and delicate arch, and she was perhaps not sorry to draw attention to them.
    Terry, looking at her across the table, wondered that she could be and look so like herself. How could you be a thief in the dead of night, and take Emily’s pearls and run out with them to an accomplice who was all ready and waiting so that one couldn’t even think it had been a sudden