“I have, I have,” she said in her ecstasy. “They are the Otterbourne diamonds just as I gave them to Beaumont. Oh, my dear good man, how can I thank you?”
He did not answer; he breathed so loudly and heavily that she thought he was going to have a fit, and she could not but wish that he might have one. Like a child with a toy she took the jewels and began fitting them together to make the ornament she had so often worn.
“Oh, how can I ever be seen without them! It is so monstrous, so brutal to shut them up at Coutts’s unseen for all those years!”
As soon as she had escaped from one danger she, woman-like, bewailed another affliction.
“How did you get over Beaumont,” she asked: “was he disagreeable about me?”
“No; like a man of sense he was glad to get his money and asked no questions whence it came. Here is his receipt.”
He held it before her, but he did not let it go out of his hands. She saw that Beaumont had received of William Massarene, on behalf of the Duchess of Otterbourne, the sum of three hundred thousand francs plus interest. A painful flush rose over her face as she saw that, and she realized more distinctly what she had done.
“How can I ever repay you?” she murmured.
William Massarene’s thin tight-shut lips smiled, not agreeably. He put the receipt back in his breast-pocket.
“And my signature?” she said timidly, the first time in all her life that timidity had ever assailed her.