“You can believe or not—I don’t care. What does anything matter if he does what he swears—that rather than let me go, he will bring my reputation to the dust? That means publishing to the world that I—Pat Temple’s wife—took the De Beers diamond!”
“But you did not.”
“Well, I kept it when I found it. That is as bad—and worse—as you have shown me.”
“Only that it didn’t happen to belong to De Beers,” said Valeria Cork. She picked it up from where it lay in its silk bag, discarded in company with the now despised and rejected necklace. “This diamond is an almost exact facsimile of the rose diamond you so much admired at De Beers’, but it happens to have come, years ago, from the Tintara mine and to be Heseltine Quelch’s own property. He took advantage of the likeness to make you believe that it was the De Beers stone you had, when it was simply his own that he wished you to keep.”
“Then—then,” cried Loree, “I am not a public criminal? De Beers cannot arrest me? No one but Heseltine Quelch can threaten me with disgrace?”
“No,” answered Valeria calmly; “it is rally I who can be arrested and disgraced, and I don’t suppose he will spare me when he finds you have slipped his clutches.”
Loree gave a long sigh.
“I cannot slip his clutches—at your expense,” she said at last.
“You have your husband to think of.”
The girl shook her head.