"Give it to me; I want it." She felt the stiff little square of cardboard between her fingers, and closed them around it fast.
After a little she went up-stairs holding tight to the baluster with one hand and to Mrs. Herrick with the other. After a little of sitting on the edge of her bed she lay down, still holding to Mrs. Herrick. She felt as though some cord within her had been drawn tight, too tight to endure, and every moment she hoped it would snap and set her free.
"You don't think I'm mad, do you?" she asked. Her friend earnestly disclaimed it. "Then things are," Flora said, "everything. Oh, oh!" The memory overwhelmed her. "He took me there as if by chance! He gave the sapphire to me for my engagement ring. Oh, dreadful! Oh, poor Harry!"
All that afternoon and all night she slept fitfully, starting up at intervals, trembling at nameless horrors—the glittering goldsmith's shop, the Chinaman, the great eye of the sapphire, and, worst of all, Harry's face, always the same calm, ruddy, good-natured, innocent-looking face that had led her to the goldsmith's shop, that had smiled at her, falling under the spell of the sapphire, that had covered, all those days, God knew what ravages of stress and strain, until the man had finally broken. That face appeared and reappeared through the flashing terrors of her dreams like the presiding genius of them all. Finally, drifting into complete repose, she slept far into the morning.
She wakened languid and weak. She lay looking about the room, and, like a person recovering after a heavy blow, wondering what had happened. Then her hand, as with her first waking thought it had done for the last week, went to the locket chain around her neck. Oh, yes, yes; she had forgotten. The sapphire was gone. Gone by fraud, gone at a kiss for ever with Harry—no, with Farrell Wand.
For Harry was not Harry; and Kerr was not Farrell Wand. He was indeed an unknown quantity. Since she had found Harry she had lost both Kerr's name and his place in her fairy-tale. She had seen his very demeanor change before her eyes. Indeed, her hour had come without her knowing it. The spell had been snapped which had made him wear the semblance of evil. His sinister form was dissolving; but what was to be his identity when finally he stood before her restored and perfect? If he were not the thief whom she had struggled so to shield, why, then he was that very strength of law and right which, for his sake, she had betrayed.
She sat up quickened with humiliation. The thing was not a tragedy, it was a grotesque. Blushing more and more crimson, struggling with strange mingled crying and laughter, she slipped out of the bed, and, still in her nightgown, ran down the hall, and knocked on Mrs. Herrick's door, until the dismayed lady opened it.
"I thought it was he," Flora gasped. "I thought it was he who had taken the ring! Why didn't he tell me? Why did he keep it secret? I would have done anything to have saved it for him, and I let Harry get it! Oh, isn't it cruel? Isn't it pitiful? Isn't it ridiculous?"
Mrs. Herrick, who, for the last thirty-six hours, had so departed from her curriculum of safety, and courageously met many strange appearances, now was to hear stranger facts. For Flora had let go completely, and Mrs. Herrick, without hinting at hysterics, let her laugh, let her cry, let her tell piece by piece, as she could, the story of the two men, from the night when Kerr had spoken so strangely at the club on the virtues of thieves to the moment when, in the willow walk, they discovered that the jewel was gone. Clara's part in the affair, and the price she had exacted, even in this unnerved moment, Flora's instinct withheld, to save Mrs. Herrick the last cruelest touch. But for the rest—she let Mrs. Herrick have it all—and under the shadow of the grim facts the two women clung together, as if to make sure of their own identities.
"I don't even know who he is," Flora said faintly.