delicate hand holding the parasol and the other resting, with the
fingers upcurled like lily petals, on her knee.

"No," said Lydia, not looking at Jeff, though she answered him, "I
sha'n't go in. It does concern me. That's what she came for. She's told
you so. To accuse me of taking it."

With the last words, a little scorn ran into her voice. It was a scorn
of what Esther might do, and it warmed her and made her suddenly feel
equal to the moment.

"No," said Esther, in her softest tone, a sympathetic tone, full of a
grave concern. "It was only to confess I ought not to have said it.
Whatever I knew, I ought to have kept it to myself. For there was the
necklace. You had sent it back. You had done wrong, but what better
could you do than send it back? And I understand--" she glowed a little
now, turning to Jeff--"I understand how wonderful it was of you to take
it on yourself."

Jeff was frowning, and though facing her, looking no further than the
lily-petalled hand. Esther was quite sure he was dwelling on the hand
with inevitable appreciation. She had a feeling that he was frowning
because it distracted him from his task of pleasing Lydia and at the
same time meeting her own sympathetic tribute. But he was not. Esther
knew a great many things about men, but she was naively unconscious of
their complete detachment from feminine allurements when they are
summoned to affairs.

"Esther," said Jeff, before Lydia could speak, "just why are you here?"

"I told you," said Esther, with a pretty air of pained surprise. "To
tell Lydia she mustn't be unhappy."

Then Lydia found her tongue.

"I'm not unhappy," she said, with a brutality of incisiveness which
offers the bare fact with no concern for its effect. "I took the
necklace. But I don't know," said Lydia, with one of her happy
convictions that she really had a legal mind and might well follow its
inspirations, "I don't know whether it is stealing to take a thing away
from a person who has stolen it herself."

"Lydia!" said Jeff warningly.

He hardly knew why he was stopping her. Certainly not in compassion for
Esther; she, at this moment, was merely an irritating cause of a spoiled
morning. But Lydia, he felt, like a careering force that had slipped
control, must be checked before she did serious harm.

"You know," said Lydia, now looking Esther calmly in the eye, "you know
you were the first to steal the necklace. You stole it years ago, from
Madame Beattie.