She ate a mouthful of capon, studiously, without speaking. Then she looked up at us again. It was then that her brother Benny for the first time noticed her change of color. "What's wrong?" he demanded, his thin young face touched suddenly with anxiety. The girl, when she finally answered him, spoke very quietly. But I could see what a struggle it was costing her. "Now, Benny, I don't want any fuss," she said, almost under her breath. "I don't want either of you to get excited, for it can't do a bit of good. But my necklace is gone." "Gone?" gasped Benny. "It can't be!" "It's gone," she repeated, with her vacant eyes on me as her brother prodded and felt about her skirt, and then even shook out her crumpled opera cloak. "Does this happen to be it?" I asked, with all the nonchalance at my command. And as I spoke I unwrapped the string of pearls with the pigeon-blood ruby and let them roll on the white damask that lay between us. She looked at them without moving, her eyes wide with wonder. I could see the color come back into her face. It was quite reward enough to witness the relieving warmth return to those widened eyes, to bask in that lovely and liquid glance of gratitude. "How," she asked a little weakly, as she reached over and took them up in her fingers, "how did you get them?" "You lost them in the theater-box during the first act," I told her. Her brother Benny wiped his forehead. "And it's up to a woman to drop forty thousand dollars and never know it," he cried. I watched her as she turned them over in her hands. Then she suddenly looked up at me, then down at the pearls, then up at me again. "_This is not my necklace_," were the astonishing words that I heard fall from her lips. I knew, of course, that she was mistaken. "Oh, yes, it is," I quietly assured her. She shook her head in negation, still staring at me. "What makes you think so?" she asked. "I don't think it, I know it," was my response. "Those aren't the sort of stones that grow on every bush in this town." She was once more studying the necklace. And once more she shook her head. "But I am left-handed," she was explaining, as she still looked down at them, "and I had my clasp, here on the ruby at the back, made to work that way. This clasp is right-handed. Don't you see, it's on the wrong side." "But you've only got the thing upside down," cried her brother. And I must confess that a disagreeable feeling began to manifest itself in the pit of my stomach as he moved closer beside her and tried to reverse the necklace so that the clasp would stand a left-handed one. He twisted and turned it fruitlessly for several moments. "Isn't that the limit?" he finally murmured, sinking back in his chair and regarding me with puzzled eyes. The girl, too, was once more studying my face, as though my movement represented a form of uncouth jocularity which she could not quite comprehend. "What's the answer, anyway?" asked the mystified youth.