mmonplace, most helpful in getting up entertainments,
and good to look at--always beautifully dressed and as fresh as if just
from a bath; sparkling green eyes, usually with good-humored mockery in
them; hard, smooth, glistening shoulders and arms; lips a crimson line,
at once cold and sensuous.

On a Friday in December Pauline came up from Dawn Hill and, after two
hours at the new house, went to the jeweler's to buy a wedding present
for Aurora Galloway. As she was passing the counter where the
superintendent had his office, his assistant said: "Beg pardon, Mrs.
Dumont. The necklace came in this morning. Would you like to look at
it?"

She paused, not clearly hearing him. He took a box from the safe
behind him and lifted from it a magnificent necklace of graduated
pearls with a huge solitaire diamond clasp. "It's one of the finest we
ever got together," he went on. "But you can see for yourself." He
was flushing in the excitement of his eagerness to ingratiate himself
with such a distinguished customer.

"Beautiful!" said Pauline, taking the necklace as he held it out to
her. "May I ask whom it's for?"

The clerk looked puzzled, then frightened, as the implications of her
obvious ignorance dawned upon him.

"Oh--I--I----" He almost snatched it from her, dropped it into the
box, put on the lid. And he stood with mouth ajar and forehead beaded.

"Please give it to me again," said Pauline, coldly. "I had not
finished looking at it."

His uneasy eyes spied the superintendent approaching. He grew scarlet,
then white, and in an agony of terror blurted out: "Here comes the
superintendent. I beg you, Mrs. Dumont, don't tell him I showed it to
you. I've made some sort of a mistake. You'll ruin me if you speak of
it to any one. I never thought it might be intended as a surprise to
you. Indeed, I wasn't supposed to know anything about it. Maybe I was
mistaken----"

His look and voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied reassuringly:
"I understand--I'll say nothing. Please show me those," and she
pointed to a tray of unset rubies in the show-case.

And when the superintendent, bowing obsequiously, came up himself to
take charge of this important customer, she was deep in the rubies
which the assistant was showing her with hands that shook and fingers
that blundered.

She did not permit her feelings to appear until she was in her carriage
again and secure from observation. The clerk's theory she co