discussed the Chatworth ring. It was not in any special word or action
on his part. It was in his whole presence that she felt the difference,
as if the afternoon's scandal had been a stimulant to him--not through
its romantic aspect, as it had affected her, but merely by the daring of
the theft itself.

She wondered, as he heaped her ermine on her shoulders, if Harry might
not have more surprises for her than she had supposed. Perhaps she had
taken him too much for granted. After all, she had known him only for a
year.

She herself was but three years old in San Francisco, and to her new
eyes Harry had seemed an old resident thoroughly established. So firmly
established was he in his bachelor quarters, in his clubs, in the
demands made upon him by the city's society, that it had never occurred
to her he had ever lived anywhere else. Nor had he happened to mention
anything of his previous life until to-night, when he had given her, in
that mention of a London ball, one flashing glimpse of former
experiences.

Impulsively she summed up the possibilities of what these might have
been. She gave him a look, incredulous, delighted, as he handed her into
the carriage. She had actually got a thrill out of easy-going,
matter-of-fact, well-tubbed Harry! It was a comradeship in itself. Not
that she would have told him. This capacity of hers for thrills she had
found need always to keep carefully covered. In the days when she was a
shoeless child--those days of her father's labor in shaft and dump--she
had dimly felt her world to be a creature of a keen, a fairly cruel
humor, for all things that did not pertain to the essence of the life
it struggled for. The wonder of the western flare of day, the magic in
the white eyes of the stars before sunrise, the mystery in the pulse of
the pounding mine heard in the dark--of such it had been as ruthless as
this new world that looked as narrowly forth at as starved a prospect
with even keener ridicule. Instinctively she had turned to both the
hard, bright face they required. It seemed that in the world at large
this faculty of hers was queer. And to be queer, to have anything that
other people had not, except money, was to be open to suspicion. And yet
from the first she had had to be queer.

Fatherless, motherless, alone upon the pinnacle of her fortune, she had
known that such an extraordinary entrance, even at this rather wide
social portal, would only be acceptable if toned down,