And as she turned to her husband with a low murmur, “Oh, George!” the paymaster saw that he was doomed. Without further show of resistance he paid the ten francs, and signed to the bowing, smirking Ben Hassan to pack up his traps and take himself off, which the Parisian did, departing with a torrent of high-flown thanks for their patronage and with every appearance of being highly satisfied with the transaction. So contented did he seem indeed, that so soon as the door closed behind him, and Nouna rushed into the bedroom to try on her purchase, George instinctively took stock of all the portable property which had been within the lively Ben Hassan’s reach, to make sure that his ostensible occupation had not been a cover for a predatory one. He had scarcely reassured himself on this point when Nouna rushed in like a radiant little fire-fly, her new ornaments twinkling in her ears, her eyes dancing with mysterious excitement, her dress changed from a simple muslin to a ball-dress of yellow gauzy material in honour of her brilliant bargain. She flitted up to him almost breathlessly, and pulled his head down to her level that she might whisper into his ear a communication which appeared to be of vital importance.
“Do you think,” she suggested solemnly, “that he could have made a mistake, and that they are real?”
George laughed, and said No, he did not think it at all likely, whereupon she was silent for a little while, and then began again in the same tone, but with much hesitation.
“You know, George, he told me that day we went to his bazaar that he had some real diamonds in his stock, and said that, that——”
“Well, that what?” asked her husband, keeping his voice at a gently subdued pitch, with a intuitive feeling that a confession was coming.
“That if I would call in—some day—by myself—he would show them to me.”
“By yourself!” cried George, all his blood on fire in a moment.
Nouna seemed at once to become a mere terror-struck heap, and her husband saw his fatal mistake.
“Did you go? Did you ever go?” he asked in the softest tones he could produce. But for a few minutes she was too much frightened even to speak, except for a muttered, “No, no, no,” as she shook and shivered. When at last by patient gentleness he had mastered her fear, he extracted from her, little by little, the avowal that she had met Ben Hassan one day outside the door of the house where he lived as she was returning home from her marketing, and that he had persuaded her to go up stairs and see some diamonds he had just received. At the door, however, Nouna declared that she had been frightened by hearing another man’s voice inside, and had refused to go in, and that Ben Hassan had brought out some earrings to show her, and had declared that if she would like to take a pair he would be satisfied with only a small payment to start with, and she could pay off the rest in instalments at her convenience.
“But I was frightened, and would not, and I tossed his hand up with the diamonds, and they fell on the floor and on the stairs, and I ran down and left him, and have never seen him since until this evening,” finished Nouna, hurrying to the end of her confession. “And I know it was wrong to go up, but I didn’t go in. And now I have done all I could by telling you everything. And you can take the earrings back if you like, only don’t be angry with me, because I can’t bear it.”