"Sure enough here's something on the gold--I can't see distinctly without my glasses. What is it, Lady Livingstone?" "The letters 'S. H.,' as Miss Dalrymple described: I cannot deny it." "Deny it! no, my lady, why should we deny it? If we are in possession of another's bracelet, lost by fraud, and if the discovery will set this young lady's mind at ease, I don't think either you or I shall be the one to deny it. Examine it for yourself, ma'am," added he, giving it to Alice. She turned it about, she put it on her arm, her eyes lighting with the eagerness of conviction. "It is certainly the same bracelet," she affirmed: "I could be sure of it, I think, without proof; but Lady Sarah's initials are there, scratched irregularly, just as she describes to have scratched them." "It is not beyond the range of possibility that initials may have been scratched on this bracelet, without its being the same," observed Lady Livingstone. "I think it must be the same," mused Sir Jasper. "It looks suspicious." "Lady Frances Chenevix understood you to say you bought this of Messrs. Garrard," resumed Alice. Lady Livingstone felt rather foolish. "What I said was, that Messrs. Garrard were my jewellers. The fact is, I do not know exactly where this was bought: but I did not consider myself called upon to proclaim that fact to a young lady who was a stranger to me, and in answer to questions which I thought verged on impertinence." "Her anxiety, scarcely less than my own, may have rendered her abrupt," replied Alice, by way of apology for Frances. "Our hope is not so much to regain the bracelet, as to penetrate the mystery of its disappearance. Can you not let me know where you did buy it?" "I can," interposed Sir Jasper: "there's no disgrace in having bought it where I did. I got it at a pawnbroker's." Alice's heart beat violently. A pawnbroker's! Was her haunting fear growing into a dread reality? "I was one day at the East-end of London, walking fast, when I saw a topaz-and-amethyst cross in a pawnbroker's window," said Sir Jasper. "The thought struck me that it would be a pretty ornament for my wife, and I went in to look at it. In talking about jewellery with the master, he reached out this diamond bracelet, and told me _that_ would be a present worth making. Now, I knew my lady's head had been running on a diamond bracelet; and I was tempted to ask what was the lowest figure he would put it at. He said it was the most valuable article of the sort he had had for a long while, the diamonds of the first water, worth four hundred guineas of anybody's money; but that, being second-hand, he could part with it for two hundred and fifty. And I bought it. There's where I got the bracelet, ma'am." "That was just the money Colonel Hope gave for it new at Garrards'," said Alice. "Two hundred and fifty guineas." Sir Jasper stared at her: and then broke forth with a comical attempt at rage, for he was one of the best-tempered men in the world.