"Then, as soon as we are out of Croydon?" Lady Betty cried, hugging her. "You promise?"
"Yes, I promise."
"Oh, I know if they were mine I should be looking at them all day!" Lady Betty rejoined; and then shrieked and threw herself back in the carriage as they passed Croydon gibbet that stood at the ninth milestone, opposite the turn to Wellington. The empty irons swaying in the wind provided her with shudders until the carriage drew up in Croydon Street, where with recovered cheerfulness, the ladies alighted and dined at the Crown, under the eye and protection of Watkyns. After a stay of an hour, they took the road again up Banstead Downs, where they walked a little at the steeper part of the way, but presently outstripping the carriage above the turn to Reigate, grew frightened in that solitude, and were glad to step in again. So down and up, and down again through the woods about Coulsdon, where the rabbits peered at them through the bracken, and raising their white scuts, loped away at leisure to their burrows.
"Now!" Lady Betty cried, when they were again in the full glare of the afternoon sun. "Now is the time! There is no one within a mile of us. The grooms," she continued, after putting out her head and looking back, "are half a mile behind."
Sophia nodded reluctantly. "You must get up, then," she said.
Lady Betty did so, and Sophia, to whom the secret had been committed the day before, lifted the leather valance that hung before the seat. Touching a spring she drew from the apparently solid woodwork of the seat--which was no more than three inches thick, so that a mail could be placed beneath it--a shallow covered drawer about twenty inches wide. She held this until Lady Betty had dropped the valance, and the two could take their seats again. Then she inserted a tiny key which she took from her bodice, into a keyhole cunningly placed at the side of the drawer--so that when the latter was in its place the keyhole was invisible. She turned the key, but before she raised the lid, bade Lady Betty look out of the window again, and assure herself that the grooms were at a distance.
"You provoking creature!" Lady Betty cried. "They are where they were--a good half-mile behind. And--yes, one of them has dismounted, and is doing something to his saddle. Oh! let me look, I am dying to see them!"
Sophia raised the lid, and her companion gasped, then screamed with delight. Over the white Genoa of the jewel case shone, and rippled, and sparkled in rills of liquid fire, a necklace, tiara, and bracelet of perfect stones, perfectly matched. Lady Betty had expected much; her mother had told her that, at the coronation of '27, Lady Coke's jewels had taken the world by storm; and that no one under the rank of a peeress had worn any like them. But reality exceeded imagination; she could not control her delight, admiration, envy. She hung over the tray, her eyes bright as the stones they reflected, her cheeks catching the soft lustre of the jewels.
"Oh, ma'am, now I know you are married!" she cried. "Things like these are not for poor lambkins! I vow I grow afraid of you. My Lady Brook will have nothing like them, and couldn't carry them if she had! She'd sink under them, the wee thing! And my Lady Carteret won't do better, though she is naught but airs and graces, and he's fifty-five if he's a day! When you go to the Drawing-Room, they'll die of envy. And to think the dear things lie under that dingy valance! I declare, I wonder they don't shine through!"
"Sir Hervey's father planned the drawer," Sophia explained, "for the carriage he built for his wife's foreign tour. And when Sir Hervey had a new carriage about six years ago, the drawer was repeated as a matter of course. Once his mother was stopped and robbed when she had the diamonds with her, but they were not found."