After tea they inquired for a room for Alvina. There was none in the house. But two doors away was another decent lodging-house, where a bedroom on the top floor was found for her.
“I think you are very well here,” said Madame.
“Quite nice,” said Alvina, looking round the hideous little room, and remembering her other term of probation, as a maternity nurse.
She dressed as attractively as possible, in her new dress of black voile, and imitating Madame, she put four jewelled rings on her fingers. As a rule she only wore the mourning-ring of black enamel and diamond, which had been always on Miss Frost’s finger. Now she left off this, and took four diamond rings, and one good sapphire. She looked at herself in her mirror as she had never done before, really interested in the effect she made. And in her dress she pinned a valuable old ruby brooch.
Then she went down to Madame’s house. Madame eyed her shrewdly, with just a touch of jealousy: the eternal jealousy that must exist between the plump, pale partridge of a Frenchwoman, whose black hair is so glossy and tidy, whose black eyes are so acute, whose black dress is so neat and chic, and the rather thin Englishwoman in soft voile, with soft, rather loose brown hair and demure, blue-grey eyes.
“Oh—a difference—what a difference! When you have a little more flesh—then—” Madame made a slight click with her tongue. “What a good brooch, eh?” Madame fingered the brooch. “Old paste—old paste—antique—”
“No,” said Alvina. “They are real rubies. It was my great-grandmother’s.”
“Do you mean it? Real? Are you sure—”
“I think I’m quite sure.”
Madame scrutinized the jewels with a fine eye.