“Now my pearls, Annette.”
“Won’t you have some flowers, my lady?”
“No. Not one. Only my pearls.”
Annette brought them, from the locked dressing-case under her own bed where she jealously kept them. They were famous pearls and many of them. One string was presently wound in and out through the coils of hair that crowned the girl’s delicate head; the other string coiled twice round her neck and hung loose over the black dress. They were her only ornament of any kind, but they were superb.
Connie looked at herself uneasily in the glass.
“I suppose I oughtn’t to wear them,” she said doubtfully.
“Why?” said Nora, staring with all her eyes. “They’re lovely!”
“I suppose girls oughtn’t to wear such things. I—I never have worn them, since—mamma’s death.”
“They belonged to her?”
“Of course. And to papa’s mother. She bought them in Rome. It was said they belonged to Marie Antoinette. Papa always believed they were looted at the sack of the Tuileries in the Revolution.”