itty, under her breath.

Alone in her bedroom the smile left Kitty's face. A brooding frown
wrinkled the smooth forehead. It was there when Celeste came in; it
remained there after Celeste departed; and it vanished only under the
soft, dispelling fingers of sleep.

There was a frown on Thomas' forehead, too; bitten deep. He tried to
read, he tried to smoke, he tried to sleep; futilely. In the middle of
the banquet, as it were, like a certain Assyrian king in Babylon,
Thomas saw the Chaldaic characters on the wall: wherever he looked,
written in fire--Thou fool!

CHAPTER XIII

Two mornings later the newspapers announced the important facts that
Miss Kitty Killigrew had gone to Bar Harbor for the week, and that the
famous uncut emeralds of the Maharajah of Something-or-other-apur had
been stolen; nothing co-relative in the departure of Kitty and the
green stones, coincidence only.

The Indian prince was known the world over as gem-mad. He had
thousands in unset gems which he neither sold, wore, nor gave away.
His various hosts and hostesses lived in mortal terror during a sojourn
of his; for he carried his jewels with him always; and often, whenever
the fancy seized him, he would go abruptly to his room, spread a square
of cobalt-blue velvet on the floor, squat in his native fashion beside
it, and empty his bags of diamonds and rubies and pearls and sapphires
and emeralds and turquoises. To him they were beautiful toys.
Whenever he was angry, they soothed him; whenever he was happy, they
rounded out this happiness; they were his variant moods.

He played a magnificent game. Round the diamonds he would make a
circle of the palest turquoises. Upon this pyramid of brilliants he
would place some great ruby, sapphire, or emerald. Then his servants
were commanded to raise and lower the window-curtains alternately.
These shifting contra-lights put a strange life into the gems; they not
only scintillated, they breathed. Or, perhaps the pyramid would be of
emeralds; and he would peer into their cool green depths as he might
have peered into the sea.

He kept these treasures in an ornamented iron-chest, old, battered, of
simple mechanism. It had been his father's and his father's father's;
it had been in the family since the days of the Peacock Throne, and
most of the jewels besides. Night and day the chest was guarded. It
lay upon an ancient Ispahan rug, in the center of the bedroom, which no
hotel serv