tle open; and presently she caught herself vaguely speculating on
how, after she had been fastened up and into her clothes so securely,
she could dispose upon herself the sapphire. How had she arrived at this
consideration? No course of reasoning led up to it. She was annoyed with
herself. If she wasn't going to wear the ring on her finger, and show
it, why did she want to take it with her at all? For fear it might be
lost? Lost, in her jewel box, in the back of the drawer! She blushed for
herself. She looked severely at her guilty reflection in the mirror.
Perhaps she did look tall; yes, and outwardly sophisticated, but
underneath that bold exterior Flora knew she was only the smallest,
youngest, most ridiculous child ever born. There were moments when this
fact appeared to her more vividly than at others. One had been the other
night when Kerr's eyes had looked through and through her; and here she
was again, when she was going to a girls' luncheon, and most wanted to
feel competent, stared out of countenance by the wonderful eye of a
ring.

Through the long afternoon it was more apparent to her than the faces of
the people around her. She was restless to get back to it, but people
talked interminably. At the luncheon they talked of Kerr. Flora knew
these girls felt a little resentment that she had so easily captured
Harry Cressy; for Harry had been more than an eligible man in the little
city. He had been an eligible personage. Not that he had money; not that
his family tree was plainly planted in their midst; but that without
these two things he had achieved what, with these things, the people he
knew were all striving for. He stood before them as the embodiment of
what they most believed in--perfect bodily splendor, and perfect
knowledge of how to get on with the world; and the fact that he wouldn't
quite be one of them, but after five years still stood a little
off--made him shine with greater brilliance, especially in the eyes of
these young girls. It was hard, they seemed to feel, that such an
apparently remote and difficult person should have succumbed so easily;
and now that a new luminary of equal luster was apparent in their sky,
Flora felt their remarks a little triumphantly aimed at her. It was odd
to her that they should envy her anything, especially those one or two
exquisite flowers of old families, whose lovely eyes saw not one inch
farther than her turquoise collar. And the way they talked of Kerr, wit