I just looked at them and shook my head. But I felt a cold sinking in that part of my organism where my courage is usually screwed to the sticking-place. “Are they real, do you think?” she said again, and she took the evening paper and poured them out on it. Spread out that way, they looked most awfully numerous and rich. There must have been more than a hundred of them of different sizes, and shaking around on the surface of the paper made them shine and sparkle like stars. “It’s a fortune, Cassius,” she said, almost in a whisper; “it’s a fortune in diamonds. Why did she leave them?” “Didn’t she say they were for Amelia?” I said, in a hollow tone. “Yes; but who is Amelia? How will we ever find her? What shall we do? It’s too awful!” We stood opposite one another with the paper between us, and tried to think. In the lamplight the diamonds winked at us with what seemed human malice. I turned round and picked up the bag they had come from, looked vaguely into it, and shook it. A last stone fell out on the paper, quite a large one, and added itself to the pile. “Why did she leave them here?” Daisy moaned. “What did she bother us for? Why didn’t she take them to Amelia herself?” “Because she was afraid,” I said, in the undertone of melodrama. “They’re stolen, Daisy.” I had voiced the fear in both our hearts. We sat down opposite one another on either side of the table, with the newspaper full of diamonds between us. I don’t know whether I was as pale as Daisy, but I felt quite as bad as she looked. And sitting thus, each staring into the other’s scared face, we ran over the events of the evening. We couldn’t make much of it; it was too uncanny. But from the first we both decided we’d felt something to be wrong. Why or how they’d come? who they were? what they wanted?--we couldn’t answer a single question. We were in a maze. The only thing that seemed certain was that they had one hundred and fifty diamonds of varying sizes that they had wanted, for some reason, to get rid of, and they’d got rid of them to us. And so we talked and talked till, by slow degrees, we got to the point where suddenly, with a simultaneous start, we looked at one another, and breathed out: “The Castlecourt diamonds!” We had read it all in the papers, and we had talked it over, and here we were with a pile of gems in a newspaper that might be the very stones. “And next year I’d hoped to know Lady Castlecourt. I’d been sure I would!” Daisy wailed. “And now--” “But you haven’t stolen the diamonds, dearest,” I said, soothingly. “You needn’t get in a fever about that.” “But, good heavens, I might just as well! Do you suppose there’s any one in the world fool enough to believe the story of what happened here to-night? People say it’s hard to believe everything in the Bible! Why, Jonah and the whale is a simple every-day affair compared to it!”