“What an exacting child it is,” he said. “I’ll tell you, and then we’ll leave the whole hateful subject. When Kivers made that last search he found where the carpet stopped at the threshold just inside the bedroom a jewel, or a piece of one, wedged into the little crevice. It looked as if it might have been a charm.” “A charm!” Mechanically she forced out the words. Oh, that tinkling bunch of golden toys her mother always wore on a chatelaine! Why, had she not long ago gone over them one by one? “I think so. For it isn’t a thing a man would be likely to wear. What do you think?” Before she could draw her laboring breath he had laid something in the frightened, relaxed hand that lay on her knee. “I got Kivers to lend it to me. I wanted to look at it under a microscope.” “This!” She was bolt upright, clear of his embrace, staring at the thing in her hand. “This!” relief that was agony in her voice. “I--I never saw it before.” “Saw it before?” He stared at her. Then he laughed. “Saw one before, I suppose you mean, little silly! It is an Egyptian scarab, one of their sacred beetles that are so precious. Look at its color in the sunset.” Golden green, turquoise blue, in its gold setting; the beetle that was older than Christianity glowed dully in her ungloved palm. But it was not its beauty that made her eyes shine, nor anything but the rapture of knowing that never, never had her mother possessed a thing like it. Had she been wronging her all this time? Had she been speaking the truth, and Abbotsford been done to death by another hand before ever she entered the house? If she had dared, she would have laughed out wildly, flung her hands out in delirious joy; but she must even turn her face from her lover, that he might not see the triumphant blood mantling in her cheeks. There had been some one else in the room! It was all she could do not to shriek it aloud. “How excited you are!” he laughed. “Do you think you would make a good detective when a little thing like this turns your head?” “Why should the thing have belonged to a woman?” she said irrelevantly. “Because a man could only wear it set in a ring, and this was never in a ring. Don’t you see the light setting of gold round it and the broken catch of a tiny chain? It has been a pendant, hanging for luck on a woman’s bracelet. For deadly luck for some poor soul,” gravely. “You are sure it wasn’t Lord Abbotsford’s own?” with a persistence that might make him wonder. “Certain. If you had ever seen Abbotsford you would see the absurdity. He was never known to wear even a jeweled stud. He told me once that he always thought of the money that was sunk in women’s diamonds, and groaned inwardly at the waste of capital. He was never very free with money, poor chap. He was a man’s man, not a woman’s.” “Yet you said he had a photograph that was not his fiancée’s?” wonderingly.