"Ah, yes, but I had failed, you know, and I was afraid to try again. I knew that you were doing big things, but you never would talk of them to me, and I thought that you considered me too stupid to understand them."
"Dita, how blindly we have misunderstood each other. Is it too late?" He whispered the words as he put her wrap about her shoulders, his voice ardent, impassioned as she had never heard it.
She cast one astonished, almost frightened glance upon him. Then, as in a daze, a dream, walked down the room, never seeing the admiring eyes that everywhere met her. She might have been in the desert, as far as they were concerned.
As the door of the motor closed on them a panic of shyness seized her. "You, you spoke of your new amulet," she said, snatching at a topic. "Have you it with you?"
"Yes. But I do not know whether you can get a very good idea of it in these shifting lights."
He took the case from his pocket and, lifting out the ornament, gave it into her hands. It was fashioned of half a dozen uncut diamonds in a setting of the most delicate and exquisite filigree.
"Old Spanish, you see," he said.
"Beautiful!" she exclaimed, turning it over and looking at it more closely. But the attention she was bestowing upon it was a mere seeming. She was thinking, or rather attempting to think, but her heart was fluttering wildly, her whole impulsive nature seemed to impel her to the action she was meditating.
"Cresswell," she lifted a face white as a snowdrop to his, "will you make an exchange with me? Will you give me this amulet and take mine?"
"Perdita!" he cried, "you do not—" his voice broke.