Lady Despard was crying audibly.
“You know, dear, who it was that saved my life,” said Cecil, in a low voice. “It was Percy Levant.” And he drew her head upon his breast, and kissed her with protecting tenderness, as if he were responding to the dead man’s solemn injunction.
When the marquis and marchioness returned from their long—but for them not too long—honeymoon, society, deeming it incumbent upon itself to bestow an impressive welcome on two of its most distinguished members, gave a ball in honor of the young, and, as the journals put it, “romantic couple.”
It was a very grand affair, and the Morning Post next morning devoted a column and a half to its description and a list of the high and mighty and famous guests, and stated, rather emphatically, that the most beautiful woman in the room was the young lady in whose honor the entertainment was given. It went into newspaper raptures over her manner, her smile, her dress, and, lastly, her jewels, which, as it said, consisted of a suite of magnificent diamonds—the Stoyle diamonds—and poetically declared that their brilliance was only outshone by the wearer’s eyes.
They were very beautiful, as a matter of fact, and no other jewels in the magnificent assemblage could compare with them, excepting, perhaps, a suite of pearls set in antique silver, which was worn by—Lady Grace Peyton.
Twice in the course of the evening Doris and she met each other, and on both occasions, while Doris, with the meekness which, somehow, always distinguishes the injured innocents, turned her head aside, Lady Grace stared at her rival with a bold, defiant flash of her handsome eyes.
“I think,” said Lady Despard, as she stood for a moment in a corner with Doris, “I think that for cool, unbrazen impudence, Grace Peyton excels all the world. Most women, all other women—having done what she has done, and knowing that we know what she has done—would have buried themselves in some German watering-place for the rest of their lives. But, oh no! she not only thinks fit to put in an appearance here to-night, but actually—actually flaunts that set of pearls which she got by fraud—stole, if any one ever stole anything in this world—from your husband. The whole set!”
“No, not the whole set,” murmured Doris, softly, as she looked at Lady Grace gliding through a waltz. “I have the ring.”
“You have! Why, I have never seen it. The ‘ring!’”