y jar, to say nothing of a breakage?"

He pursed his rather thick lips, that smiled so easily.

"When the treasure is a treasure, genuinely valuable, I don't mind it. I
feel then that I am doing worthy service."

"You really are a dear, you know!" she said, with a sudden change, a
melting. "It was good of you to ask me, when you didn't want to."

She leaned a little toward him, with one light hand palm downward on the
cushion of the sofa, and her small, rather square chin thrust forward in
a way that made her look suddenly intense.

"I'll try not to be like Mrs. Shiffney. I'll try not to make him feel
transparent."

"I'm not sure that you could," he said, smiling at her.

"How horrid of you to doubt my powers! Why, why will nobody believe I
have anything in me?"

She brought the words out with a force that was almost vicious. As she
said them it happened that Claude Heath turned a little. His eyes
travelled down the room and met hers. Perhaps her mother had just been
speaking to him of her, had been making some assertion about her. For he
seemed to look at her with inquiry.

When Charmian turned away her eyes from his she added to Max Elliot:

"But what does it matter? Because people, some people, can't see a
thing, that doesn't prove that it has no existence. And I don't really
care what people think of me."

"This--to your old friend!"

"Yes. And besides, I expect one must possess to discover."

Her voice was almost complacent.

"You deal in enigmas to-night."

"One ought to carry a light when one goes into a cave to seek for gold."

But Elliot would not let her see that he had from the first fully
understood her impertinence.

"Let us go back to the fire," he said. "Unless you are really afraid of
the heat. Let us hear what your mother and Heath are talking about."

"I'm not afraid of anything except a Te Deum."

"There's Mrs. Shiffney speaking to him. I don't think we shall have it
to-night."

"Then I'll venture to draw near," said Charmian, again assuming a
semblance of awe.

The minx was evidently uppermost in her as they approached the others.
She walked with a dainty slowness, a composed consciousness, that were
almost the least bit affected, and as she stood still for a minute close
to her mother, with her long eyes half shut, she looked typically of the
world worldly, languid, almost prettily disdainful.

Mrs. Shiffney was speaking of the concert of that afternoon with
discriminatio