"Come," she said, resting her head upon her hand, "I want to know from you why you are here. It is not for me to tell you about your life, is it?"
"I will be frank," I replied; "it is not. My life has already spoken a good deal for itself. What I did come here to see was the making of diamonds. They tell me you possess the philosopher's stone, or something near to it."
She looked at me with a penetrating gaze, and then laughed a little hardly.
"And you believed it?" she asked presently.
"Not for a moment," said I; "but I thought it was not unlikely that you had some amusing trick which you would not mind showing me. I am very much interested in jewels, you know."
"So am I," she exclaimed, but with the air of one whose mind is away from the words—"there is nothing more beautiful or more mysterious on earth than a diamond. It just seems to be a prison for lovely things of which it gives us the lights when we treat it well. And you thought I might amuse you with a trick? That was a poor compliment, wasn't it?"
The thing was said with a swift reversion of her mind to the subject, as I could see; and there was a world of humor in her eyes when she turned them on me.
"It was no poor compliment," said I, "since you have convinced such a man as Colonel Oldfield that you can make rubies. He is a judge of jewels, too."
"And a very good one," she replied; "but really there was nothing in my experiment. What I do has been done by French chemists for twenty years past. The Colonel came here with an open mind—but you, you closed the doors of yours as you came upstairs."
I protested feebly, but she did not listen to my answer.