Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the presence of the paper, and the suppressed excitement of her companion's face—seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of her light eyes, through all her smooth, pretty person, before she reached for an explanation.
"What is the most extraordinary thing?" The query came bland and smooth, as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.
"Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon it simply vanished! And—and it was all our own crowd who were there!"
"Vanished!" Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard in the face of this extraordinary statement. "Stolen, do you mean?" She made it definite.
Flora flung out her hands.
"Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room, in the middle of the afternoon, when everybody was there—and they haven't the faintest clue."
"But how?" For a moment the preposterous fact left Clara too quick to be calm.
Again Flora's eloquent hands. "That is it! It was in a case like all the other jewels. Harry saw it"—she glanced at the paper—"as late as four o'clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it was gone."
Flora leaned forward on her elbows, chin in hands. No two could have differed more than these two women in their blondness and their prettiness and their wonder. For Clara was sharp and pale, with silvery lights in eyes and hair, and confronted the facts with an alert and calculating observation; but Flora was tawny, toned from brown to ivory through all the gamut of gold—hair color of a panther's hide, eyes dark hazel, glinting through dust-colored lashes, chin round like a fruit. The pressure of her fingers accented the slight uptilt of her brows to elfishness, and her look was introspective. She might, instead of wondering on the outside, have been the very center of the mystery itself, toying with unthinkable possibilities of revelation. She looked far over the head of Clara Britton's annoyance that there should be no clue.
"Why, don't you see," she pointed out, "that is just the fun of it? It might be anybody. It might be you, or me, or Ella Buller. Though I would much prefer to think it was some one we didn't know so well—some one strange and fascinating, who will presently go slipping out the Golden Gate in a little junk boat, so that no one need be embarrassed."