“Precisely. Hand ’em over, Evie, and I’ll leave the lot with the Prize Agents as I go back. Whatever they were put in your room for, ’twas for no good, and you know that as well as I do.”
“He won’t leave me so much as one little weeshy diamond! Ah, it’s a cruel brother I have, and a cruel husband too! I wonder have they any hearts at all, at all?”
“It’s a brother and a husband miles too good for you y’have,” said Brian, tying up the stones inexorably in his handkerchief. “See here, Ambrose, I’ll be getting you a receipt for these, in case there’d be any question of a trap.”
“You have a head on your shoulders,” said Richard heartily. “The Sahib’s horse!” he called to a servant.
Presently he came back from the steps to find Eveleen pouting in her corner of the lounge. “Sure you might have let me send them to the Prize Agent,” was her complaint. “What bit of a chance have I of doing the right things, when two great men seize them out of my hands and do them instead?”
“You see,” with a grave face, “you are so sadly destitute of jewellery that they might have been a temptation.”
“Ah now, aren’t y’ashamed to turn my own words against me like that? D’ye not know a good horse is more to me than a diamond necklace any day?”
“But not more than this sort of thing, I hope, or I shall feel I have gone wrong again.” He dropped a little parcel into her lap, and stood watching while she snatched it up in surprise.
“And what’s this, now? Have you been wasting your money on me, Ambrose? I’m surprised at you!”
Happily the possible double meaning of her last sentence did not occur to her as she eagerly opened the case, and displayed a gold locket set with pearls—large and massive, eminently what was then called “a handsome piece of jewellery.” “And did you really choose this for me?”