"No," said Esther, in her softest tone, a sympathetic tone, full of a grave concern. "It was only to confess I ought not to have said it. Whatever I knew, I ought to have kept it to myself. For there was the necklace. You had sent it back. You had done wrong, but what better could you do than send it back? And I understand—" she glowed a little now, turning to Jeff—"I understand how wonderful it was of you to take it on yourself."
Jeff was frowning, and though facing her, looking no further than the lily-petalled hand. Esther was quite sure he was dwelling on the hand with inevitable appreciation. She had a feeling that he was frowning because it distracted him from his task of pleasing Lydia and at the same time meeting her own sympathetic tribute. But he was not. Esther knew a great many things about men, but she was naïvely unconscious of their complete detachment from feminine allurements when they are summoned to affairs.
"Esther," said Jeff, before Lydia could speak, "just why are you here?"
"I told you," said Esther, with a pretty air of pained surprise. "To tell Lydia she mustn't be unhappy."
Then Lydia found her tongue.
"I'm not unhappy," she said, with a brutality of incisiveness which offers the bare fact with no concern for its effect. "I took the necklace. But I don't know," said Lydia, with one of her happy convictions that she really had a legal mind and might well follow its inspirations, "I don't know whether it is stealing to take a thing away from a person who has stolen it herself."
"Lydia!" said Jeff warningly.
He hardly knew why he was stopping her. Certainly not in compassion for Esther; she, at this moment, was merely an irritating cause of a spoiled morning. But Lydia, he felt, like a careering force that had slipped control, must be checked before she did serious harm.
"You know," said Lydia, now looking Esther calmly in the eye, "you know you were the first to steal the necklace. You stole it years ago, from Madame Beattie. No, I don't know whether it's stealing to take it from you when you'd no business to have it anyway. I must ask some one."
Lydia was no longer pale with apprehension. The rose was on her cheek. Her eyes glowed with mischief and the lust of battle. Once she darted a little smiling look at Jeff. "Come on," it seemed to say. "I can't be worse off than I am. Let's put her through her paces and get something out of it—fun, at least."