id wearily.

"My brother's ship is old, but it has been refitted lately to something
like comfort. It's old name was the Sapphire."

This was my shot, and it hit hard.

"The Sapphire! the Sapphire!" she whispered with dilated eyes. "Did you
ever hear--did you ever find--But what nonsense! You must think me the
absurdest of women."

The color came back to her face, and she laughed quite naturally.

"The fact is, Miss Blake, I was very ill and miserable when I was on
shipboard, and to this day any sudden reminder of it gives me a
shock.--Did water spot it?" she said to Rhoda, who came in at this
point.

I thought over all the threads of the circumstance that had come into my
hand, and like Mr. Browning's lover I found "a thing to do."

The next morning I made an excuse to go down to the ship with my
brother, and there, by dint of pressure, I got those stained and dingy
papers into my possession again. I had only that day before me, for we
were going to a hotel the same evening, and the Raynes were to set out
next day for their summer place among the hills, a long way back of
Bombay. Our stay had already delayed their departure.

This was my plot: Mrs. Rayne had been reading a book that I had bought
for the home-voyage, and was to finish it before evening. I selected the
duplicate of the paper which "Waitstill Atwood Eliot" had put in a
bottle and cast adrift when her case had been desperate, and laid it in
the book a page or two beyond Mrs. Rayne's mark. It seemed impossible
that she could miss it: I watched her as a chemist watches his first
experiment.

Twice she took up the book, and was interrupted before she could open
it: the third time she sat down so close to me that the folds of her
dress touched mine. One page, two pages: in another instant she would
have turned the leaf, and I held my breath, when a servant brought in a
note. Her most intimate friend had been thrown from her carriage, and
had sent for her. It was a matter of life and death, and brooked no
delay. In ten minutes she had bidden us a cordial good-bye, and dropped
out of my life for all time.

She never finished _my_ book, nor I _hers_. I had had it in my heart, in
return for her warm hospitality, to cast a great stone out of her past
life into the still waters of her present, and her good angel had turned
it aside just before it reached her. I might have asked Mr. Rayne in so
many words if his wife's name had been Waitstill Atwood Eliot