The inimitable Jeeves

them apart. I opened it, and there were the good old pearls, as merry and bright as dammit, smiling up at me. I gazed feebly at the man. I was feeling a bit overwrought.
    ‘Jeeves,’ I said. ‘You’re an absolute genius!’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Relief was surging over me in great chunks by now. Thanks to Jeeves I was not going to be called on to cough up several thousand quid.
    ‘It looks to me as though you have saved the old home. I mean, even a chappie endowed with the immortal rind of dear old Sid is hardly likely to have the nerve to come back and retrieve these little chaps.’
    ‘I should imagine not, sir.’
    ‘Well, then - Oh, I say, you don’t think they are just paste or anything like that?’
    ‘No, sir. These are genuine pearls and extremely valuable.’
    ‘Well, then, dash it, I’m on velvet. Absolutely reclining on the good old plush! I may be down a hundred quid but I’m up a jolly good string of pearls. Am I right or wrong?’
    ‘Hardly that, sir. I think that you will have to restore the pearls.’
    ‘What! To Sid? Not while I have my physique!’
    ‘No, sir. To their rightful owner.’
    ‘But who is their rightful owner?’
    ‘Mrs Gregson, sir.’
    ‘What! How do you know?’
    ‘It was all over the hotel an hour ago that Mrs Gregson’s pearls had been abstracted. I was speaking to Mrs Gregson’s maid shortly before you came in and she informed me that the manager of the hotel is now in Mrs Gregson’s suite.’
    ‘And having a devil of a time, what?’
    ‘So I should be disposed to imagine, sir.’
    The situation was beginning to unfold before me.
    ‘I’ll go and give them back to her, eh? It’ll put me one up, what?’
    ‘Precisely, sir. And, if I may make the suggestion, I think it might be judicious to stress the fact that they were stolen by-.’
    ‘Great Scott! By the dashed girl she was hounding me on to marry; by Jove!’
    ‘Exactly, sir.’
    ‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘this is going to be the biggest score off my jolly old relative that has ever occurred in the world’s history.’
    ‘It is not unlikely, sir.’
    ‘Keep her quiet for a bit, what? Make her stop snootering me for a while?’
    ‘It should have that effect, sir.’
    ‘Golly!’ I said, bounding for the door.

    Long before I reached Aunt Agatha’s lair I could tell that the hunt was up. Divers chappies in hotel uniform and not a few chambermaids of sorts were hanging about in the corridor, and through the panels I could hear a mixed assortment of voices, with Aunt Agatha’s topping the lot. I knocked but no one took any notice, so I trickled in. Among those present I noticed a chambermaid in hysterics, Aunt
    Agatha with her hair bristling and the whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, the hotel manager fellow.
    ‘Oh, hallo!’ I said. ‘Hallo-allo-allo!’
    Aunt Agatha shooshed me away. No welcoming smile for Bertram.
    ‘Don’t bother me now, Bertie,’ she snapped, looking at me as if I were more or less the last straw.
    ‘Something up?’
    ‘Yes, yes, yes! I’ve lost my pearls.’
    ‘Pearls? Pearls? Pearls?’ I said. ‘No, really. Dashed annoying. Where did you see them last?’
    ‘What does it matter where I saw them last? They have been stolen.’
    Here Wilfred the Whisker King, who seemed to have been taking a rest between rounds, stepped into the ring again and began to talk rapidly in French. Cut to the quick he seemed. The chambermaid whooped in the corner.
    ‘Sure you’ve looked everywhere?’ I said.
    ‘Of course I’ve looked everywhere.’
    ‘Well, you know, I’ve often lost a collar stud and -‘
    ‘Do try not to be so maddening, Bertie! I have enough to bear without your imbecilities. Oh, be quiet! Be quiet!’ she shouted in the sort of voice used by sergeant-majors and those who call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee. And such was the magnetism of her forceful personality that Wilfred subsided as if he had run into a wall. The chambermaid continued to go strong.
    ‘I say,’ I said, ‘I think there’s something the matter with this girl. Isn’t she crying or something? You may not have spotted it, but I’m rather quick at noticing things.’
    ‘She stole my pearls! I am convinced of it.’
    This started the whisker specialist off again, and in about a couple of minutes Aunt Agatha had reached the frozen grande-dame stage and was putting the last of the bandits through it in the voice she usually reserves for snubbing waiters in restaurants.
    ‘I tell