I went there on the second day of October. How awful it was! I wore a heavy veil, and gave a fictitious name. Several men looked at the diamonds, and I noticed that they looked at me and whispered together. Finally they told me they would give me four thousand pounds on them, at some interest--I’ve forgotten what it was now--and that they would replace them with paste, so that only an expert could tell the difference. The next day I went back, and they gave me the money. I do not think they had any idea who I was. At any rate, while the papers were full of speculations about the Castlecourt diamonds, they made no sign. I paid off all my debts, both in Paris and London; I even paid a year’s interest on the diamonds. For a short time I breathed again, and was gay and light-hearted. My husband would never know that I had not paid my bills for five years and had been threatened with a lawsuit. It was delightful to get rid of this fear, and I was quite my old self. I suppose I ought to have felt more guilty; but when one is relieved of a great weight, one’s conscience is not so sensitive as it gets when there is really nothing to be sensitive about. It was after I had grown accustomed to feeling free and unworried that I began to realize what I had done. I had stolen the diamonds. I was a thief! It did not comfort me much to think that no one might ever find it out; in fact, I do not think it comforted me at all, and I know in the beginning I expected it would. It was what I had done that rankled in me. I felt that I would never be peaceful again till they were redeemed and put back in their old settings. That was what I continually dreamed of. It seemed to me if I could see them once more in their own case I would be happy and care free, as I had been in those first perfect years of my married life. The fear that at this time most haunted me and was most terrifying was that my husband might discover what I had done. His wife, that he had so loved and trusted, had become a thief! No one who has not gone through it knows how I felt. I did not know any one could suffer so. I went out constantly, to try and forget; and, when things were very cheerful and amusing, I sometimes did. And then I remembered--I was a thief; I had stolen my husband’s diamonds, and, if he ever found it out, what would happen to me? This was the position I was in when the false diamonds were taken. It was the last thing in the world I had thought could happen. When, that night of the Duke of Duxbury’s dinner, I saw the empty case and Jeffers’ terrified face, the world reeled around me. I could not for a moment take it in. Only, in my mind, the diamonds had become a sort of nightmare; anything to do with them was a menace, and I followed an instinct that had possession of me when I tried to hide the empty case from my husband.