Sylvia with such vehemence that the elder woman started
back, then she turned again to her mirror. She held up her hands and
made the gems flash with colored lights. There were several very good
diamonds, although not of modern cut; there was a fairly superb
emerald, also pearls and amethysts and green-blue turquoises, on her
hands. Rose made a pounce upon a necklace of pink coral, and clasped
it around her neck over the pearls.

"I have them all on now," she said, and her laugh rang out again.

Sylvia surveyed her with a sort of rapture. She had never heard of
"Faust," but the whole was a New England version of the "Jewel Song."
As Marguerite had been tempted to guilty love by jewels, so Sylvia
was striving to have Rose tempted by jewels to innocent celibacy. But
she was working by methods of which she knew nothing.

Rose gazed at herself in the glass. A rose flush came on her cheeks,
her lips pouted redly, and her eyes glittered under a mist. She
thrust her shining fingers through her hair, and it stood up like a
golden spray over her temples. Rose at that minute was wonderful.
Something akin to the gleam of the jewels seemed to have waked within
her. She felt a warmth of love and ownership of which she had never
known herself capable. She felt that the girl and her jewels, the
girl who was the greatest jewel of all, was her very own. For the
first time a secret anxiety and distress of mind, which she had
confided to no one, was allayed. She said to herself that everything
was as it should be. She had Rose, and Rose was happy. Then she
thought how she had found the girl when she first entered the room,
and had courage, seeing her as she looked now, to ask again: "What
was the matter? Why were you crying?"

Rose turned upon her with a smile of perfect radiance. "Nothing at
all, dear Aunt Sylvia," she cried, happily. "Nothing at all."

Sylvia smiled. A smile was always somewhat of an effort for Sylvia,
with her hard, thin lips, which had not been used to smiling. Sylvia
had no sense of humor. Her smiles would never be possible except for
sudden and unlooked-for pleasures, and those had been rare in her
whole life. But now she smiled, and with her lips and her eyes. "Rose
wasn't crying because she thought Mr. Allen was going to marry
another girl," she told herself. "She was only crying because a girl
is always full of tantrums. Now she is perfectly happy. I am able to
make her perfectly happy. I know that all a gi