Barak's face changed instantly; she smiled, nodded, and waved her hand to him, to say that it was all right, and that she was quite satisfied. Then she made a sort of salute that he thought very graceful indeed, as if she were taking something from near the floor and laying it on her forehead, and she laughed softly and was out of the room and had shut the door before he could call her back again.
He stood still in the middle of the room, looking at the gem in his hand with an expression of grave doubt.
'Well,' he said to himself, and his lips formed the words, though no sound articulated them, 'that's a queer sort of a morning's work, anyway.'
He reflected that the very last thing he had ever expected was a present of a fine ruby from a pretty heathen girl in man's clothes, recommended to him by Logotheti. Though he almost laughed at the thought when it occurred to him, he did not like the idea of keeping the [{120}] stone; yet he did not know what to do with it, for it was more than probable that he was never to see Barak again, and if he ever did, it was at least likely that she would refuse to take back her gift, and as energetically as on the first occasion.
At that moment it occurred to him that he might sell it to a dealer and give the proceeds to Lady Maud for her good work. His recollections of Sunday School were very misty, poor man, but a story came back to him about some one who had observed that something valuable might have been sold and the money given to the poor. If he had remembered the rest, and especially that the person who made the suggestion had been Judas Iscariot, he would certainly have hesitated, for he would have been sure that there was something wrong with any advice that came from that quarter. But, happily for the poor, the name of Judas had dropped out of his memory in connexion with the incident.
'At least it will do some good to somebody, and I shall not be keeping what I've no right to.'
A mere acquaintance, judging him by his hard face and his extraordinary financial past, would not have believed that such a simple and highly moral reflexion could occur to him. But Lady Maud, who knew him, would have given him credit for this and much more, even though she felt that he had lately tempted her to do something which her father would call dishonourable, and that the temptation had not yet quite taken itself off to the bottomless pit, where temptations are kept in pickle by the devil's housekeeper. [{121}]
Mr. Van Torp took his hat and gloves, but as he was really a good American, he had no stick to take; and he went out without even telling Stemp that he was going. In spite of what Londoners were calling the heat, he walked, and did not even feel warm; for in the first place he had lately come from Washington and New York, where a Hottentot would be very uncomfortable in July, and, moreover, he had never been at all sensitive to heat or cold, and lived as soberly as an Arab in the desert. Therefore London seemed as pleasantly cool to him with the thermometer at eighty as it seems to a newly landed Anglo-Indian who has lately seen the mercury at a hundred and thirty-five on the shady side of the verandah.
He walked up at a leisurely pace from his hotel by the river to Piccadilly and Bond Street, and he entered a jeweller's shop of modest appearance but ancient reputation, which had been in the same place for nearly a century, and had previously been on the other side of the street.
Outside, two well-dressed men were looking at the things in the window; within, a broad-shouldered, smart-looking man with black hair and dressed in perfectly new blue serge was sitting by the counter with his back to the door, talking with the old jeweller himself. He turned on the chair when he heard the newcomer's step, and Mr. Van Torp found himself face to face with Konstantin Logotheti, whom he had supposed to be in Paris.