“Now look!” said Mrs. Anstey, when it came to her. Slipping the ring upon her hand--a pretty hand, we may be sure--where it sent into prompt eclipse all the rest of her outfit of jewels, she held it up for Carmichael to view. “Did you ever see such a beauty?” she exclaimed. “I declare I shall go home and never sleep a wink to-night for coveting it! Such color, such luster, and such size! It ought to be on the turban of a Grand Mogul.” Carmichael said nothing, but he stirred uneasily upon his chair. The childish raptures of the speaker seemed to him like the crackling of thorns under the pot. “There, Gertrude, take the tempter!” concluded Mrs. Anstey, plucking the ring from her hand and extending it with affected resignation. “I tell mamma I will accept nothing less than this for my wedding present,” answered Gertrude, receiving it in her outstretched palm. “But so far I can’t get her to promise it to me. She says it must go by will to my eldest brother, a boy at school, who doesn’t know the difference between an emerald and a bit of glass, the wretch! Look, Mr. Carmichael and Mr. Oliver; I will show you something nobody else at the table has seen. The prettiest thing about the Carcellini is the way it answers to a shaft of light. It leaps up like a fountain and fairly bubbles radiance. See! I will lean over and hold it between my thumb and finger sidewise under this candle nearest us, and you can get the effect.” As she did so Carmichael’s eyes glittered and his breath came quick. A moment later a shiver of alarm and excitement ran around their quarter of the table. In inclining her head to catch the best light from the candle Gertrude Ellison had set fire to the fanciful aigrette of twisted tulle that soared high from her hair behind. The young men on either side of her sprang upon their feet. It was Oliver who, seizing the now blazing ornament, plucked it easily from the girl’s mass of fluffy hair and crushed out the flames between his strong brown fingers. “It is all over; I was not even singed, mamma, thanks to Mr. Oliver,” called out Gertrude to her mother, who had just perceived the commotion. At once the inexorable law of conventional society closed upon the little incident. People resumed their interrupted chat, the servants circled the board as before, everybody had some anecdote to relate about a narrow escape from burning that had come under his experience. And then, amid the murmur of voices, the tinkle of glasses, the strains from an orchestra that had begun to play a waltz upon the upper landing of the stairs, Gertrude Ellison turned upon Carmichael a perfectly blanched face. “Don’t give any sign,” she whispered, “but tell me what I am to do. I have lost the Carcellini emerald.” Carmichael darted one swift glance toward Tom Oliver, like the tongue of a toad flashing out to catch a fly and withdrawing with its morsel.