All that afternoon and all night she slept fitfully, starting up at
intervals, trembling at nameless horrors--the glittering goldsmith's
shop, the Chinaman, the great eye of the sapphire, and, worst of all,
Harry's face, always the same calm, ruddy, good-natured,
innocent-looking face that had led her to the goldsmith's shop, that had
smiled at her, falling under the spell of the sapphire, that had
covered, all those days, God knew what ravages of stress and strain,
until the man had finally broken. That face appeared and reappeared
through the flashing terrors of her dreams like the presiding genius of
them all. Finally, drifting into complete repose, she slept far into the
morning.
She wakened languid and weak. She lay looking about the room, and, like
a person recovering after a heavy blow, wondering what had happened.
Then her hand, as with her first waking thought it had done for the last
week, went to the locket chain around her neck. Oh, yes, yes; she had
forgotten. The sapphire was gone. Gone by fraud, gone at a kiss for ever
with Harry--no, with Farrell Wand.
For Harry was not Harry; and Kerr was not Farrell Wand. He was indeed an
unknown quantity. Since she had found Harry she had lost both Kerr's
name and his place in her fairy-tale. She had seen his very demeanor
change before her eyes. Indeed, her hour had come without her knowing
it. The spell had been snapped which had made him wear the semblance of
evil. His sinister form was dissolving; but what was to be his identity
when finally he stood before her restored and perfect? If he were not
the thief whom she had struggled so to shield, why, then he was that
very strength of law and right which, for his sake, she had betrayed.
She sat up quickened with humiliation. The thing was not a tragedy, it
was a grotesque. Blushing more and more crimson, struggling with strange
mingled crying and laughter, she slipped out of the bed, and, still in
her nightgown, ran down the hall, and knocked on Mrs. Herrick's door,
until the dismayed lady opened it.
"I thought it was he," Flora gasped. "I thought it was he who had taken
the ring! Why didn't he tell me? Why did he keep it secret? I would have
done anything to have saved it for him, and I let Harry get it! Oh,
isn't it cruel? Isn't it pitiful? Isn't it ridiculous?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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