"They are the finest rubies I have seen, Pauline; they are superb stones." He held them so that the light gleamed in them until they shone like fire. The proud, dark eyes glanced indifferently at them. "What have you to say to Lady Darrell, Pauline?" asked Sir Oswald, growing angry at her silence. The girl's beautiful lip curled. "Lady Darrell was good to think of me," she said, coldly; "and the jewels are very fine; but they are not suitable for me." Her words, simple as they were, fell like a thunder-cloud upon the little group. "And pray why not?" asked Sir Oswald, angrily. "Your knowledge of the world is greater than mine, and will tell you better than I can," she replied, calmly. "Three months since they would have been a suitable present to one in the position I held then; now they are quite out of place, and I decline them." "You decline them!" exclaimed Lady Darrell, hardly believing that it was in human nature to refuse such jewels. Pauline smiled calmly, repeated the words, and walked away. Sir Oswald, with an angry murmur, replaced the jewels in the case and set it aside. "She has the Darrell spirit," he said to his wife, with an awkward smile; and she devoutly hoped that her husband would not often exhibit the same. CHAPTER XXV. A TRUE DARRELL. The way in which the girl supported her disappointment was lofty in the extreme. She bore her defeat as proudly as some would have borne a victory. No one could have told from her face or her manner that she had suffered a grievous defeat. When she alluded to the change in her position, it was with a certain proud humility that had in it nothing approaching meanness or envy. It did not seem that she felt the money-loss; it was not the disappointment about mere wealth and luxury. It was rather an unbounded distress that she had been set aside as unworthy to represent the race of the Darrells--that she, a "real" Darrell, had been forced to make way for what, in her own mind, she called a "baby-faced stranger"--that her training and education, on which her dear father had prided himself, should be cast in her face as unworthy and deserving of reproach. He and his artist-friends had thought her perfection; that very "perfection" on which they had prided themselves, and for which they had so praised and flattered her, was the barrier that had stood between her and her inheritance.