the orange-coloured sachet that you lost I believe that there were
eighteen stones of great value?'

She made no answer, but she looked at me as if I fascinated her. Her
very breath seemed to pause and wait on my words. She was so little
conscious of anything else, of anything outside ourselves, that a score
of men might have come up behind her, unseen and unnoticed.

CHAPTER VIII. A MASTER STROKE--Continued

I took from my breast a little packet wrapped in soft leather, and I
held it towards her.

'Will you open this?' I said. 'I believe that it contains what your
brother lost. That it contains all I will not answer, Mademoiselle,
because I spilled the stones on the floor of my room, and I may have
failed to find some. But the others can be recovered; I know where they
are.'

She took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers shaking.
A few turns and the mild lustre of the stones shone out, making a kind
of moonlight in her hands--such a shimmering glory of imprisoned light
as has ruined many a woman and robbed many a man of his honour. MORBLEU!
as I looked at them and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced
perplexity--I wondered how I had come to resist the temptation.

While I gazed her hands began to waver.

'I cannot count,' she muttered helplessly. 'How many are there?'

'In all, eighteen.'

'There should be eighteen,' she said.

She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so
twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real and that she
was not dreaming. Then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and I
saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was
grown as keen and vicious as before.

'Well?' she muttered between her teeth.

'Your price, man? Your price?'

'I am coming to it now, Mademoiselle,' I said gravely. 'It is a simple
matter. You remember the afternoon when I followed you--clumsily and
thoughtlessly perhaps--through the wood to restore these things? In
seeming that happened about a month ago. I believe that it happened the
day before yesterday. You called me then some very harsh names, which I
will not hurt you by repeating. The only price I ask for the restoration
of your jewels is that you on your part recall those names.'

'How?' she muttered. 'I do not understand.'

I repeated my words very slowly. 'The only price or reward I ask,
Mademoiselle, is that you take back those names and say that they we