Before the Fact by Francis Iles Page A

dismal parties she had ever attended, this was quite the worst.
    And then, suddenly, the whole atmosphere changed.
    Harry ceased watching the play and grinned; Lady Fortnum sat up with a jerk and visibly preened herself; Winnie Treacher’s dull eye brightened; Mary Farroway’s gentle smile of resignation changed to one of welcome; her sister frankly stood up and waved; the players on the court stopped the game to brandish their rackets – and Lina herself jumped up and almost ran towards the figure in white flannels who had emerged from the house and was coming towards them.
    The mere appearance of Johnnie had been enough to turn disaster into triumph.
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    “It will turn up, Lady Fortnum,” Lina repeated helplessly. “It’s bound to turn up. I mean, it can’t be far, can it?”
    “Bound to turn up,” Major Scargill repeated robustly. “Can’t possibly be far.”
    “Yes, it’s bound to turn up,” chorused half-a-dozen other voices, with the greatest conviction.
    “I had it when I came out from tea,” Lady Fortnum said firmly, looking at her hostess with what Lina resentfully felt to be a positively suspicious eye. “I remember quite distinctly.”
    “You had it when I was sitting next to you,” Lina said, and would have liked to add: “I remember wondering why the hell you wanted to wear it at a tennis party.”
    “Yes,” agreed Lady Fortnum. “I had it when you were sitting next to me.” No doubt she did not say it in the least pointedly, but her words sounded pointed to Lina.
    “Johnnie,” she said, a little impatiently, “are you sure you’ve looked everywhere?”
    “I’ve personally turned over every blade of grass within twenty yards,” Johnnie said, with complete cheerfulness. “Do you know what I think, Lady Fortnum? That you’ll find it when you undress.”
    “I hope so,” Lady Fortnum agreed drily. “I don’t want to insist on its value, among friends, but I shouldn’t at all care to lose it permanently.”
    Lina reddened angrily, but Johnnie, with a quite unabashed grin, said: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to make sure in the house here? I’ll come and see fair play.”
    Somebody guffawed, and Lady Fortnum’s highly powdered cheeks took on a slightly more violet tinge. “Thank you, but I can’t agree that
that
is the place where one had better look.”
    Lina said, coldly and distinctly: “I thought, Johnnie, you were going to say: Isn’t Lady Fortnum sure she wouldn’t like all of us to turn out our pockets?”
    There was a moment’s horrified silence, during which Lina, furious as she was, was yet able to wonder whether it was really she who had spoken those words which she had heard dropped into the gathering so calmly.
    Then Major Scargill, extremely red and clucking like an old hen, said the right things and smoothed down Lady Fortnum’s very ruffled feathers; and Johnnie, with a comical grimace over his shoulders to the others which somehow managed to transform that lady from the aggrieved into the aggrieving party, conducted her to her car.
    Lina, still angry, but very conscious of the responsibility on her shoulders for the finding of a diamond worth five thousand pounds, watched him hold her in conversation for a couple of minutes before she got inside it, and watched during that short time Lady Fortnum’s face change from stony suspicion, through affability, to something extremely like apology. Johnnie really was marvellous.
    The search continued with serious energy. Everyone else stayed behind to help with it. Even Freda Newsham pretended to look, and Janet Caldwell seemed almost as perturbed as Lina herself. They tumbled over each other in the intensity of their efforts; for since Lady Fortnum had not moved more than a dozen yards between the time when she was certainly wearing the pendant and the moment when she discovered its disappearance, the area of useful search was small.
    Sympathy, at first silent and then gradually more and more outspoken, was