ten
per cent. If not, there was five thousand dollars' profit in the bargain
under any conditions.

They were Siamese stones, and the cutting was of an old design. They
were not from any stock in Europe. Hargrave knew what Europe held of
sapphires. These were from some Oriental stock. And everybody bought an
Oriental stone wherever he could get it. How the seller got it did not
matter. Nobody undertook to verify the title of a Siamese trader or a
Burma agent.

Mrs. Farmingham walked about for several minutes, saying over to herself
as she had said before:

"Now what shall I do?"

Then like the big, dominant, decisive nature that she was she came to a
conclusion.

"All right," she said, "bring in the money in the morning and get the
sapphires. I'll take them up in a day or two. Good-by, major; come
along, Mr. Hargrave." And she went out of the room.

The American stopped at the door to bow to the old Rumanian officer who
was standing up beside the table before the heap of sapphires. They got
into the carriage at the curb before Blackwell's Hotel. Mrs. Farmingham
put Hargrave down at the Empire Club, and the carriage passed on, across
Piccadilly Circus toward the Ritz.

The following morning Hargrave got the sapphires from Major Mikos, and
paid him eighteen thousand dollars in English sovereigns for them. He
wanted gold to carry back with him for the jewels that he had brought
out of the kingdom of Rumania. He seemed a simple, anxious person. He
wished to carry his treasures with him like a peasant. The sapphires
looked better in the daylight. There ought to have been seven thousand
dollars' profit in them, perhaps more; seven thousand dollars, at any
rate, that very day in the London market. Hargrave took them to the
Empire Club and put them in a sealed envelope in the steward's safe.

The thin drift of yellow remained in the city; that sulphurous haze
that the blanket of sea fog, moving over London, presses down into her
streets. It was not heavy yet; it was only a mist of saffron; but it
threatened to gather volume as the day advanced.

At luncheon Hargrave got a note from Mrs. Farmingham, a line scrawled
on her card to say that she would call for him at three o'clock.
Her carriage was before the door on the stroke of the hour, and she
explained that the money to redeem the jewels had arrived. The Credit
Lyonnais had sent it over from Paris. She seemed a bit puzzled about it.
She had telegraphed the Credit