Bartley Bradstone shrugged his shoulders.
“I counted upon you,” he said. “But if you can’t, you can’t, and there’s an end of it. I’m awfully disappointed, and so’s Olivia, I’m sure.”
Olivia said nothing, but, directly lunch was over, rose to leave the room. As she did so Faradeane took a morocco case from his pocket.
“You must be quite tired of presents, Miss Vanley,” he said, “but I have ventured to bore you with one, if you will accept it,” and he placed the case in her hand, and turned aside to speak to Bradstone.
“Eh?” said the squire, “let us see what it is, my dear,” and he put up his eyeglasses.
She opened the case, her hands trembling and her color coming and going, and revealed a superb necklet of gems in an antique setting.
It was no “wedding present” of the commonplace type, but evidently a rare and costly, perhaps priceless, specimen of ancient jewelry.
The squire uttered an exclamation.
“Why, Faradeane, this is—isn’t this rather too big a present for my little girl?” he said, with a smile, but a grateful and affectionate light in his eyes. “If she had been a princess, instead of the daughter of a country squire, you could not have been more generous.”
“Miss Olivia is a princess to all of us, sir,” he said in the half-sad and melodious voice which rendered even his commonplaces significant. “It is an old relic I have had by me for some time, and I thought that Miss Vanley would forgive its old-fashionedness.”