cted her spirits, dimmed her radiant personality? He
abominated the idea but admitted the possibility. She would not be the
first person to be the victim of a secret but furious passion for jewels.
He recalled a novel of Hichens; not the matter but the central idea.
Authors of other races had used the same motive. Well, if his wife had an
abnormal streak in her the sooner he found out the truth the better.

He closed the door of the safe, swung the bookcase into place, slipped
the ruby with its curious gold chain that looked massive but hardly
weighed an ounce, into his pocket, rang for a servant and told him to ask
Mrs. Ruyler to come down to the library as soon as she was dressed.

CHAPTER II

I

Ruyler sighed as he heard his wife walk down the hall. There had been a
time when she came running like a child at his summons, but in these days
she walked with a leisurely dignity which to his possibly morbid ear
betrayed a certain crab-like disposition in her little high heels to slip
backward along the polished floor.

She came in smiling, however, and kissed him quickly and warmly. Her
extraordinary hair hung down in two long braids, their blue blackness
undulating among the soft folds of her thin pink negligee. For the first
time Ruyler realized that pink was Helene's favorite color; she seldom
wore anything else except white or black, and then always relieved with
pink. And why not, with that deep pink blush in her white cheeks, and the
velvet blackness of her eyes? People still raved over Helene Ruyler's
"coloring," and Price told himself once more as she stood before him, her
little head dragged back by the weight of her plaits, her slender throat
crossed by a narrow line of black velvet, that he had married one of the
most beautiful girls he had ever seen.

He was seized with a sudden sharp pang of jealousy and caught her in his
arms roughly, his gray eyes almost as black as hers.

"Tell me," he exclaimed, and the new fear almost choked him, "does any
other man interest you--the least little bit?"

She stared at him and then burst into the most natural laugh he had heard
from her for months. "That is simply too funny to talk about."

"But I am able to give you so little of my time. Working or tired out at
night--letting you go out so much alone--but I haven't the heart to
insist that you yawn over a book, while I am shut up here, or too fagged
to talk even to you. Life is becoming a tragedy for busi