It was nearly seven o’clock when we heard the sound of her skirts in the passage. Chawlmers slipped off into his master’s rooms, shutting the door quietly behind him. My lady was looking very beautiful. She had on a blue hat trimmed with blue and gray hydrangeas, and underneath it her hair was like spun gold, and her eyes looked soft and dark. It never seemed to tire her to be always on the go. But I’d thought lately she’d been going too much, for sometimes she was pale, and once or twice I thought she was out of spirits--the way she’d been in the country last summer. She seemed so to-night, not talking as much as usual. There were some letters for her on the corner of the dressing-table, and I could see her face in the glass as she read them. One made her smile, and then she sat thinking and biting her lip, which was as red as a cherry. She seemed to me to be preoccupied. When I was making the side “_ondulations_” of her hair--which everybody knows is a most critical operation--she jerked her head, and said suddenly she wondered how the children were. I never before knew my lady to think about the children when her hair was being attended to. She was sitting in front of the dressing-table, her toilet complete, when she stretched out her hand to the leather case of the diamonds. I was looking at the reflection in the mirror, thinking that she was as perfect as I could make her. She, too, had been looking at the back of her head, and still held the small glass in one hand. The other she reached out for the diamonds. The case had a catch that you had to press, and I saw, to my surprise, that she raised the lid without pressing this. Then she gave a loud exclamation. There were no diamonds there! She turned round and looked at me, and said: “How odd! Where are they, Jeffers?” I felt suddenly as if I was going to fall dead, and afterward, when my lady stood by me and said it was nonsense to suspect me, one of the things she brought up as a proof of my innocence was the color I turned and the way I looked at that moment. “Jeffers!” she said, suddenly rising up quick out of her chair. And then, without my saying a word, she went white and stood staring at me. “My lady, my lady,” was all I could falter out, “I don’t know--I don’t know!” “Where are they, Jeffers? What’s happened to them?” My voice was all husky like a person’s with a cold, as I stammered: “They were in the case an hour ago.” My lady caught me by the arm, and her fingers gripped tight into my flesh. “Don’t say they’re stolen, Jeffers!” she cried out. “Don’t tell me that! Lord Castlecourt would never forgive me. He’ll never forgive me! They’re worth thousands and thousands of pounds! They _can’t_ have been stolen!”