Justine removed the dainty bonnet and the filmy lace mantle, folded the absurd parasol, which looked like a summer cabbage on a stalk, so flounced and furbelowed was the little silken dummy utterly useless as a sunshade, and while her mistress undid the buttons of her silver-gray silk gown, fetched a white morning robe, in which she clothed her tall full form. During these preliminary operations of her night toilette Miss Montressor talked away gaily--not about the day's proceedings, but about numerous trifles connected with her approaching journey and her sojourn in America. But when her hair had been brushed and the maid's duties were nearly completed, a trifling circumstance occurred which disturbed Miss Montressor's serenity. Her draped dressing-table stood in front of the large window of her bedroom, a French window opening to the floor, and looking out upon the trim little grassy terrace which ran along the back of the house, and from whence the garden, very pretty and effective for its extent, was reached by two steps. On this dressing-table stood her tolerably well-stored jewel-box. Miss Montressor was replacing some ornaments she had worn that day in the satin-lined tray of the casket when she perceived that the window was open, and asked Justine angrily whether she had been aware of this. 'No,' Justine replied; 'she hadn't noticed it.' 'Then you ought to have noticed it,' said Miss Montressor; 'such carelessness is abominable. Any one who pleased might have taken my jewel-box off the table without the least difficulty. The idea of leaving the window open on a Sunday, with no one in the house but yourself and such a lot of tramps about!' Justine stood convicted, and could only promise that she would be more careful for the future; she was rather saucy sometimes, and ready with an answer to a rebuke, but on this occasion she said very little. There had been no one about the place, and though she had been the only person in the house--the cook and the page having had a holiday--she had hardly left Miss Montressor's room, had indeed been reading at the open window the greater part of the day. But Justine, after her mistress was in bed, while folding up the shawl she had worn that day in so preoccupied a mood that she did not observe the pin with the carved gem for its head which was stuck into the soft woollen fabric, remembered, with a great sense of relief for the escaped danger, how there had come to the house late in the afternoon a man in the dress of a sailor who spoke like an American. This man had been rather hard to get rid of. He had pertinaciously pressed his claim for a little assistance, and had been hard to persuade that the lady was not really at home. 'Just fancy,' thought Justine, 'if he had slunk round to the back of the house and seen the window open, and made off with the jewel-case; and I only wonder he didn't get hold of that or of something, for he was as objectionable a tramp as ever I saw.'