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I went and jumped into a taxi-cab, telling the driver to stop at the corner of Léontine's street.

With the inside knowledge that I had it was not difficult to reconstruct the theft of Mary Dalghren's pearls. Léontine, I thought, was behind the whole dirty business. She was playing a double game, or possibly a triple one; the pearls themselves, an act of revenge and spite against a girl she no doubt considered to be her successful rival, and, finally, the chance of driving me back to the Under-World. Jealousy had probably induced her to do what she would never for a moment have thought of doing otherwise. She had leaped to the conclusion that I was in love with Miss Dalghren, and had decided that it was this, more than gratitude, which had led me to stick to my good resolutions.

Therefore she had made up her mind to get the pearls, thinking that, even if the actual suspicion did not fall upon me, I would, nevertheless, be held in a measure to blame, and that this might lead to a rupture with my benefactors which would drive me back to my old life. So she had seen Ivan and persuaded him to undertake the job. This, I thought, had not been very easy for her to do. I had read Ivan's character as that of a man of soul and sentiment. He was an enemy to Society, like the rest of them, but his Slavic nature was warm and emo- 74