azzled
him with her approval when he enlarged on the merits of Kincaid and when
he pledged all his powers of invention to speed the bridal. Frantic to
think what better to do, she waltzed with him, while he described the
colonel of the departing regiment as such a martinet that to ask him to
delay his going would only hasten it; waltzed on when she saw her
grandmother discover the knife's absence and telegraph her a look of
contemptuous wonder. But ah, how time was flying! Even now Kincaid must
be returning hitherward, licensed!

The rapturous music somewhat soothed her frenzy, even helped her
thought, and in a thirst for all it could give she had her partner swing
her into the wide hall whence it came and where also Hilary must first
reappear. Twice through its length they had swept, when Anna, in
altered dress, came swiftly down the stair with Constance protestingly
at her side. The two were speaking anxiously together as if a choice of
nuptial adornments (for Constance bore a box that might have held the
old jewels) had suddenly brought to mind a forgotten responsibility. As
they pressed into the drawing-rooms the two dancers floated after them
by another door.

When presently Flora halted beside the gun and fanned while the dance
throbbed on, the two sisters stood a few steps away behind the opened
show-case, talking with her grandmother and furtively eyed by a few
bystanders. They had missed the dagger. Strangely disregarded by Anna,
but to Flora's secret dismay and rage, Constance, as she talked, was
dropping from her doubled hands into the casket the last of the gems.
Now she shut the box and laid it in Anna's careless arms.

Leaving the gray man by the gun, Flora sprang near. Anna was enduring,
with distracted smiles, the eager reasonings of Madame and Constance
that the vanished trinket was but borrowed; a thief would have taken the
_jewels_, they argued; but as Flora would have joined in, every line of
Anna's face suddenly confided to her a consternation whose cause the
silenced Flora instantly mistook. "Ah, if you knew--!" Anna began, but
ceased as if the lost relic stood for something incommunicable even to
nearest and dearest.

"They've sworn their love on it!" was the thought of Flora and the
detective in the same instant. It filled her veins with fury, yet her
response was gentle and meditative. "To me," she said, "it seemed such a
good-for-nothing that even if I saw it is gone, me, I think I wouldn'