A gasp of uncontrollable feeling from the surrounding group of girls, then absolute stillness. “I fail to recognize it,” observed Mr. Driscoll, taking it in his hand. “Whose slipper is this?” he asked in a manner not to be gainsaid. Still no reply, then as he continued to eye the girls one after another a voice--the last he expected to hear--spoke and his daughter cried: “It is mine. But it was not I who walked in it down the balcony.” “Alicia!” A month’s apprehension was in that cry. The silence, the pent-up emotion brooding in the air was intolerable. A fresh young laugh broke it. “Oh,” exclaimed a roguish voice, “I knew that you were all in it! But the especial one who wore the slipper and grabbed the pendant cannot hope to hide herself. Her finger-tips will give her away.” Amazement on every face and a convulsive movement in one half-hidden hand. “You see,” the airy little being went on, in her light way, “I have some awfully funny tricks. I am always being scolded for them, but somehow I don’t improve. One is to keep my jewelry bright with a strange foreign paste an old Frenchwoman once gave me in Paris. It’s of a vivid red, and stains the fingers dreadfully if you don’t take care. Not even water will take it off, see mine. I used that paste on my pendant last night just after you left me, and being awfully sleepy I didn’t stop to rub it off. If your finger-tips are not red, you never touched the pendant, Miss Driscoll. Oh, see! They are as white as milk. “But some one took the sapphires, and I owe that person a scolding, as well as myself. Was it you, Miss Hughson? You, Miss Yates? or--” and here she paused before Miss West, “Oh, you have your gloves on! You are the guilty one!” and her laugh rang out like a peal of bells, robbing her next sentence of even a suggestion of sarcasm. “Oh, what a sly-boots!” she cried. “How you have deceived me! Whoever would have thought you to be the one to play the mischief!” Who indeed! Of all the five, she was the one who was considered absolutely immune from suspicion ever since the night Mrs. Barnum’s handkerchief had been taken, and she not in the box. Eyes which had surveyed Miss Driscoll askance now rose in wonder toward hers, and failed to fall again because of the stoniness into which her delicately-carved features had settled. “Miss West, I know you will be glad to remove your gloves; Miss Strange certainly has a right to know her special tormentor,” spoke up her host in as natural a voice as his great relief would allow. But the cold, half-frozen woman remained without a movement. She was not deceived by the banter of the moment. She knew that to all of the others, if not to Peter Strange’s odd little daughter, it was the thief who was being spotted and brought thus hilariously to light. And her eyes grew hard, and her lips grey, and she failed to unglove the hands upon which all glances were concentrated. “You do not need to see my hands; I confess to taking the pendant.”