she looked, he steadied her with his arm. "We
won't talk of this business any more," he said.

"But I must talk of it," Flora insisted tremblingly. "I don't even know
what you are."

For the first time he showed apologetic. He looked from one to the other
with a sort of helpless simplicity.

"Why, I'm Chatworth--I'm Crew; I'm the chap that owns the confounded
thing!"

To see him stand there, announced in that name, gave the tragic farce
its last touch. Flora had an instant of panic when flight seemed the
solution. It took all her courage to keep her there, facing him,
watching, as if from afar off, Mrs. Herrick's acknowledgment of the
informal introduction.

"I came here, quietly," he was saying, "so as to get at it without
making a row. Only Purdie, good man! knew--and he's been wondering all
along why I've held so heavy a hand on him. We'll have to lunch with
them again, eh?" He turned and looked at Flora. "And make all those
explanations necessitated by this lady's wonderful sense of honor!"

It was here, somewhere in the neighborhood of this sentence of doubtful
meaning, that Mrs. Herrick left them. In looking back, Flora could never
recall the exact moment of the departure. But when she raised her eyes
from the grass where they had been fixed for what seemed to her eternity
she found only Kerr--no, Chatworth--standing there, looking at her with
a grave face.

"Eh?" he said, "and what about that honor of yours? What shall we say
about it, now that the sapphire's gone and no longer in our way?"

She was breathing quick to keep from crying. "I told you that day at the
restaurant."

"Yes, yes; you told me why you kept the sapphire from me, but"--he hung
fire, then fetched it out with an effort--"why did you take it in the
first place?"

She looked at him in clear astonishment. "I didn't know what it was."

"You didn't!"

It seemed to Flora the whole situation was turning exactly inside out.
The light that was breaking upon her was more than she could bear. "Oh,"
she wailed, "you couldn't have thought I meant to take it!"

"Then if you didn't," he burst out, "why, when I told you what it was,
didn't you give it to me?"

The cruel comic muse, who makes our serious suffering ridiculous, had
drawn aside the last curtain. Flora felt the laughter rising in her
throat, the tears in her eyes.

"You guessed who I was," he insisted, advancing, "at least what I
represented."

She hid her face in her hands,