of us."

"One of what? I'm a man. I'm myself. Which, pardon me, dear lady, is
just what you won't be--yourself."

"But if you have to be what people expect?" She clung to her first
principle of safety in the midst of this onslaught.

"People don't want what they expect--if you care for that." He waved it
away with his quick, white hand.

"But you have to care, unless you want to be queer." Her poor little
secret was out before she knew, and he looked at it, laughing
immoderately, yet somehow delightfully.

"Ah, if you think the social game is the game that counts! I had
expected braver things of you. The game that counts, my girl," he
preached it at her with his long white hand, "the game that is going on
out here is the big, red game of life. That's the only one that's worth
a guinea; and there's no winning or losing, there's no right or wrong to
it, and it doesn't matter what a man is in it as long as he's a good
one."

"Even if he is a thief?" The question was out of Flora's lips before she
could catch it. It was a challenge. She had meant to confound him; but
he caught it as if it delighted him.

"Well, what would you think?"

He threw it back at her.

What hadn't she thought! How persistently her fancy had played with the
question of what sort of man that one might be who had so wonderfully
put his hand under a glass case and drawn out the Chatworth ring. Why,
outwardly, he must have been like all the crowd around him, to have
escaped unnoticed; but, inwardly, how much superior in power and skill
to have so completely overreached them!

"Oh," she laughed dubiously, "I suppose he is a good one as long as he
isn't caught."

"What!" His face disowned her. "You think he's a renegade, do you? A
chap in perpetual flight, taking things because he has to, more or less
pursued by the law? Bah! It's a guild as old, and a deal more honorable,
than the beggar's. Your good thief is born to it. It's his caste. It's
in his blood. It isn't money that he wants. If he had a million he'd be
the same. And it isn't a mania either. It's a profession." The
Englishman leaned back and smiled at her over the elegance of his long,
joined finger-tips.

She looked at him with a delighted alarm, with an increasing elation;
but whether these arose from his lawless declarations and the singular
way they kept setting before her more vividly moment by moment the
possible character of the present keeper of the Chatworth ring, or
wh