The roc’s egg was brought to him one heavily raining day by a lady in a cab in whom he, well-used though he was to such secret visits, had difficulty in recognizing the blonde English beauty. It had been now in his possession for four years, and though it was a magnificent object such as could be fully appreciated only by trained eyes like his own, he began to get tired of keeping it locked up, and unseen by any eyes save his own. He would not have felt tired if she had paid him any interest on his loan; but she had never paid him a centième. She had not even paid anything for the imitation diamond which had cost him a good deal, for it was admirably and exquisitely made; it had been worn many times at Courts at home and abroad, and she had nearly laughed outright more than once at the precautions with which it was surrounded when it was not worn, and the fire-proof iron safe screwed down to the floor in which it dwelt when it was not the envied occupant of her own white breast; not even the sharp suspicious eyes of Cocky had ever discerned any difference in it from that of the great gem which it represented. “_C’est une ingrâte_,” said Beaumont to himself when he saw a person for whom he had done so much flash past him on the boulevards as she drove to Chantilly or La Marche; and he hated ingratitude. For her own part, having given him the great jewel and worn the substitute successfully, she had of late dismissed the subject from her mind with her usual happy _insouciance_. But now, clauses in her husband’s will and in that of his father’s, had recalled it to her harshly, and with insistence. She knew that the jewels, like most other things, were held in trust for the little rosy-cheeked man in the further corner of the carriage; and that sooner or later they would be subjected to examination, and in all probability taken out of her custody. She had no longer even the rights in them which are called rights of user. So much she had gathered as she had listened to the reading of the will; she was not sure, but she was afraid, and this glacial fear gripped her light and courageous heart, and almost made its pulses stand still. She felt almost to hate the unconscious little duke, tucked up in a bear-skin with his legs crossed under him in a corner of the railway-carriage. Jack could not get out of his mind the idea of poor Pappy being left all alone in that dark stone place underground; “and he can’t even smoke,” he thought, with a tender pity in his little heart for the man who had so often pinched his legs and tugged at his hair. His mother reclined in her compartment looking very white, grave, and angry, in her sombre clothes, and in her unwonted taciturnity; his uncles talked to each other of things that he could not understand. Gerry was sound asleep; Jack watched the steam fly past the window-pane. “It’s a horrid thing to be deaded,” he thought. “Oh, I hope,--I hope,--I _do_ hope,--Harry won’t ever be deaded.”