Now, in the quiet of her own room, Susy lay and pondered on the distance she had travelled during the last year. Strefford had read her mind with his usual penetration. It was true that there had been a time when she would have thought it perfectly natural that Ellie should tell her everything; that the name of young Davenant’s successor should be confided to her as a matter of course. Apparently even Ellie had been obscurely aware of the change, for after a first attempt to force her confidences on Susy she had contented herself with vague expressions of gratitude, allusive smiles and sighs, and the pretty “surprise” of the sapphire bangle slipped onto her friend’s wrist in the act of their farewell embrace. The bangle was extremely handsome. Susy, who had an auctioneer’s eye for values, knew to a fraction the worth of those deep convex stones alternating with small emeralds and brilliants. She was glad to own the bracelet, and enchanted with the effect it produced on her slim wrist; yet, even while admiring it, and rejoicing that it was hers, she had already transmuted it into specie, and reckoned just how far it would go toward the paying of domestic necessities. For whatever came to her now interested her only as something more to be offered up to Nick. The door opened and Nick came in. Dusk had fallen, and she could not see his face; but something in the jerk of the door-handle roused her ever-wakeful apprehension. She hurried toward him with outstretched wrist. “Look, dearest--wasn’t it too darling of Ellie?” She pressed the button of the lamp that lit her dressing-table, and her husband’s face started unfamiliarly out of the twilight. She slipped off the bracelet and held it up to him. “Oh, I can go you one better,” he said with a laugh; and pulling a morocco case from his pocket he flung it down among the scent-bottles. Susy opened the case automatically, staring at the pearl because she was afraid to look again at Nick. “Ellie--gave you this?” she asked at length. “Yes. She gave me this.” There was a pause. “Would you mind telling me,” Lansing continued in the same dead-level tone, “exactly for what services we’ve both been so handsomely paid?” “The pearl is beautiful,” Susy murmured, to gain time, while her head spun round with unimaginable terrors. “So are your sapphires; though, on closer examination, my services would appear to have been valued rather higher than yours. Would you be kind enough to tell me just what they were?” Susy threw her head back and looked at him. “What on earth are you talking about, Nick! Why shouldn’t Ellie have given us these things? Do you forget that it’s like our giving her a pen-wiper or a button-hook? What is it you are trying to suggest?”