It was then that the little accident which was to play so large a part in my life occurred. She had leaned forward from her wicker chair to set her empty coffee-cup on the table. As she did so the string of pearls which she wore at the opening of her simple white dress loosened itself and slipped like a tiny snake to the floor of the veranda. From a corresponding chair on the other side of the table I sprang up and stooped. When I raised myself with the pearls in my right hand I slipped them into my pocket. Between the fingers of my left hand I held a lighted cigar. Bareheaded, I was wearing white flannels and tennis shoes. Now that the moment had come, I felt extraordinarily cool—as cool as on the night when I had slipped this string of pearls into my pocket before. I looked down and smiled at her. Leaning back in her chair, she looked up and smiled at me. I shall always see her like that—in white with a slash of silk of the red of her lips somewhere about her waist, and a ribbon of the same round her dashing Panama hat. Her feet in little brown shoes were crossed. With an elbow on the arm of her chair, she held a small red fan out from her person, though she wasn’t actively using it. “What does that mean?” she asked, idly, at last. [Illustration: “Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?”] “Doesn’t it remind you of anything?” “No—of nothing.” “Didn’t you ever see any one put these pearls into his pocket before?” “Why, no!” She added, as if an idea had begun to dawn in the back of her memory, “Not in that way.” “Oh, I remember. You didn’t see him put them in at all. You only saw him take them out.” The smile remained on her features, but something puzzled gave it faint new curves. “Why—” “It was like this, wasn’t it?” I drew out the pearls and threw them on the table. She bent forward slightly, still smiling, like a person watching with bewildered intensity a conjurer’s trick. “Why—” “Only your gold-mesh purse was with them—and your diamond bar-pin—and your rings.” “Why—who, who on earth could have told you?” I, too, continued to smile, consciously wondering if I should be as calm as this in the hour of death. “Who do you think?” “It wasn’t Elsie Coningsby?” “No. She was in the house, but—” “How did you know that?” She uttered a mystified laugh. “She _was_ there! It was one of the nights she stayed with me when papa and mamma were down here superintending some changes before we could move in. But I never told her anything about it.” “Why didn’t you—when she was right on the spot?” “Oh, because.” The smile disappeared. She stopped looking up at me to turn her eyes toward the foxgloves and scrub-oak. “Yes? Because—what?” “Because I promised—that man—I wouldn’t.” “Why should you have made him such a promise?” “Oh, I don’t know. Just at the time I was—I was sorry for him.” “And aren’t you sorry for him still?” She looked up at me again with one of her bright challenges.