Lizzie hesitated for a moment. "Yes," said she. "That is,—no. But he ordered it to be made; and then it came,—after he was—dead."
"He knew their value, then?"
"Oh, dear, yes. Though he never named any sum. He told me, however, that they were very—very valuable."
Lord Fawn did not immediately recognise the falseness of every word that the woman said to him, because he was slow and could not think and hear at the same time. But he was at once involved in a painful maze of doubt and almost of dismay. An action for the recovery of jewels brought against the lady whom he was engaged to marry, on behalf of the family of her late husband, would not suit him at all. To have his hands quite clean, to be above all evil report, to be respectable, as it were, all round, was Lord Fawn's special ambition. He was a poor man, and a greedy man, but he would have abandoned his official salary at a moment's notice, rather than there should have fallen on him a breath of public opinion hinting that it ought to be abandoned. He was especially timid, and lived in a perpetual fear lest the newspapers should say something hard of him. In that matter of the Sawab he had been very wretched, because Frank Greystock had accused him of being an administrator of tyranny. He would have liked his wife to have ten thousand pounds' worth of diamonds very well; but he would rather go without a wife for ever,—and without a wife's fortune,—than marry a woman subject to an action for claiming diamonds not her own. "I think," said he, at last, "that if you were to put them into Mr. Camperdown's hands—"
"Into Mr. Camperdown's hands!"
"And then let the matter be settled by arbitration—"
"Arbitration? That means going to law?"
"No, dearest,—that means not going to law. The diamonds would be entrusted to Mr. Camperdown. And then some one would be appointed to decide whose property they were."
"They're my property," said Lizzie.
"But he says they belong to the family."