always
credited her, why, you may take Belle.'

"After I got over being stupefied at the amazing effrontery of the
thing--if accepted seriously--I began to do some pretty tall thinking,
and I thought rapidly, too.

"'Is that a bargain?' I said at length.

"I spoke quite calmly and seriously, and he favored me with a surprised
stare. But he snapped out a curt reply.

"'It is,' said he. 'And I don't give a rap how you get it, either. I
wish you success.'

"Was I cast-down and disheartened? Swift--good Lord!--words can't
define my feelings. Sly disposition is sanguine enough, but when the
blue devils once do get hold of me--well, I 'm all in. I believe I
suffer more in the dumps than any other living mortal.

"But somehow or other, that mad proposal stuck by me; it followed me
persistently into the depths of my misery and colored all my hopeless
cogitations--if only I could get my hands upon that bit of crimson
glass! Great Scott, Swift! I believe, had I known where it was and
could have gotten at it, I would have stolen it. Yes, sir,
sardonically as it was advanced, the proposal to obtain the Paternoster
ruby was not to be banished from my mind, and in a day or two I found
myself weighing the chances of success.

"Well, the results in favor of accomplishing an undertaking so
foolhardy were, even when contemplated in the most favorable light,
exactly _nil_. And then there flashed into my mind a number of
questions which--and I trust you 'll believe me when I assert it--had
never come to me before: Who was my uncle's heir? To whom, when he
died, would the ruby go? Who, or what, was to benefit by all that vast
wealth he was so laboriously piling up?

"Now I had--and still have, for that matter--good reasons for believing
that I was the only living relative, and of course knew that if he were
to die intestate the whole of his property would pass to me simply by
operation of law.

"But suppose he _had_ made a will--was it likely that I had been
entirely ignored? The drawing of a will is a solemn matter to the
party most concerned, and at such a time the tie of blood is apt to
urge its claims in a still small voice--a mere whisper, maybe, but
astonishingly pertinacious. Therefore, was Mr. Page so indifferent to
his only living kin--had all the common feelings of humanity so far
evaporated from his heart--that he would remain deaf to that feeble
plea?

"The end of this line of thought was a resolution