"Sylvia's," I said, low and sort of awed.
Anne nodded.
"Yes, the one she had on that night. Mrs. Fowler said she wanted to give me something that had been hers. I wouldn't have taken anything so handsome but I think the poor lady couldn't bear the sight of it, reminding her of her sorrow as it did."
She moved it about and the stones sparkled like bits of fire in the lamplight. I stretched out my hand and took it, for diamonds tempt me like meat the hungry—that's the Jew in me, I suppose.
"You won't call the King your cousin when you wear this," I said, and I held it against my chest, looking down at the brightness of it.
"That's just where Sylvia had it on," said Anne almost in a whisper, "where the front of her dress crossed. One of the police officers told me."
My mother was a Catholic and it's Catholic I was raised, for though my father was a Jew he loved my mother and let her have her way with me.
"Wouldn't you think," I said, "that when the murderer saw the cross on her it would have stayed his hand?"
"Wouldn't you," said Anne, "but to men as evil as that the cross means nothing. And then out in the dark that way, he probably never saw it."
Babbitts' knock sounding, I handed it back to her and let him in, feeling bashful before Anne, who didn't know how often Mrs. Galway was retiring at eight-thirty. She left soon after, saying Mrs. Fowler liked her to be round in the evening, which was news to me, as she'd told me that the Fowlers always sat in the sitting-room together, the Doctor reading aloud till Mrs. Fowler got sleepy.