that was possible for her to tell. For the rest, how she came to
fix suspicion on the jewel, he might think her fanciful or morbid. It
didn't matter as long as the weary thing was out of her hands. It
couldn't matter!

She had made it out all clear in her mind that this was the right thing
to do. It hadn't occurred to her she had made it out only on the
hypothesis of Kerr's certainly going. It had not occurred to her that
she might have to make her great moral move in the dark; or, what was
worse, in the face of his most gallant resistance. In this discouraging
light she saw her intention dwindle to the vanishing point, but the
great move was just as good as it had been before--just as solid, just
as advisable. Being so very solid, wouldn't it wait until she had time
to show him that she really meant what she said, supposing she ever had
a chance to see him again? The possibility that at this moment he might
actually have gone had almost escaped her. She recalled it with a
disagreeable shock, but, after all, that was the best she could hope,
never to see him again! She ought to be grateful to be sure of that, and
yet if she were, oh, never could she deprive him of so much beauty and
light by her keeping of the sapphire as he would then have taken away
from her!

She would come down then, indeed, level with plainest, palest, hardest
things--people and facts. Her romance--she had seen it; she had had it
in her hands, and it had somehow eluded her. It had vanished,
evaporated. It had come to her in rather a terrific guise, presented to
her on that night at the club by the first debonair wave of the man's
hand; and now he might have gone out through that white way into the
east, taking back her romance as the fairy takes back his unappreciated
gift.

She leaned and looked through the thin veil of her curtains at the
splendid day. It was one of February's freaks. It was hot. The white
ghost of noon lay over shore and sea. Beneath her the city seemed to
sleep gray and glistening. The tops of hills that rose above the
up-creeping houses were misted green. Across the bay, along the northern
shore, there was a pale green coast of hills dividing blue and blue.
Ships in the bay hung out white canvas drying, and the sky showed whiter
clouds, slow-moving, like sails upon a languid sea. Beneath her,
directly down, through hanging darts of eucalyptus leaves, hemmed with
high hedges, the oval of her garden showed her a pattern like