You must never tell Tom, Mag, promise! He wouldn't see. He couldn't understand. I couldn't make him know what I felt any more than I'd dare tell him what I did.
I shut the door.
But not behind me. I shut it on the street and—Mag, I shut for ever another door, too; the old door that opens out on Crooked Street. With my hand on my heart, that was beating as though it would burst, I flew back again through the black corridor, through the wings and out to Obermuller's office. With both my hands I ripped open the neck of my dress, and, pulling the chain with that great diamond hanging to it, I broke it with a tug, and threw the whole thing down on the desk in front of him.
"For God's sake!" I yelled. "Don't make it so easy for me to steal!"
I don't know what happened for a minute. I could see his face change half a dozen ways in as many seconds. He took it up in his fingers at last. It swung there at the end of the slender little broken chain like a great drop of shining water, blushing and sparkling and trembling.
His hands trembled, too, and he looked up at last from the diamond to my face.
"It's worth at least fifty thousand, you know—valued at that."
I didn't answer.
He got up and came over to where I had thrown myself on a bench.
"What's the matter, Olden? Don't I pay you enough?"