"In the dining-room?"
"Yes. Did you think he'd go? He's waiting there to hear Jeff assault you, and come to the rescue. You told him you were afraid." She was on her way to the door, but she turned. "I may as well take this," she said idly, and swept the necklace into her hand. She held it up and shook it in the light, and Esther's eyes, as she knew they would, dwelt on it with a hungry passion.
"You are taking it away," said Esther. "You've no right to. He said he had paid you money on it when it was lost. If he did, it belongs to him. And I'm his wife."
"I might as well take it with me," said Madame Beattie. "You don't act as if you were his wife."
A quick madness shot into Esther's brain and overwhelmed it, anger, or fright, she could not tell what. She did not cry out because she knew Alston Choate was in the next room, but she spoke sobbingly:
"He did take it out of my bag. You have planned it between you to get it back into your hands."
Madame Beattie laughed pleasantly and went upstairs. And Esther crossed the little hall and stood in the dining-room door looking at Alston Choate. As she looked, her heart rose, for she saw conquest easy, in his bowed head, his frowning glance. He had not wanted to stay, his attitude told her; he was even yet raging against staying. But he could not leave her. Passion in him was fighting side by side with feminine implacability in her against the better part of him. She went forward and stood before him droopingly, a most engaging picture of the purely feminine. But he did not look at her, and she had to throw what argument she might into her voice.
"You were so good to stay," she said, with a little tired sigh. "They've gone. Come back into the other room."
He rose heavily and followed her, but in the library he did not sit down. Esther sank into a low chair, leaned back in it and closed her eyes. She really needed to give way a little. Her nerves were trembling from the shock of more than one attack on them; fear, anger, these were what her husband and Madame Beattie had roused in her. Jeffrey was refusing to help her, and she hated him. But here was another man deftly moved to her proximity by the ever careful hand of providence that had made the creatures for her.
Alston stood by the mantel, leaning one elbow on it, with a strange implication of wanting to put his head down and hide his face.