Tired out with her ceaseless pacing to and fro over the carpet, her nerve gave way, and for almost the first time in her life she burst into tears, bitter, hysterical, cruel tears, the tears which disfigure and age the woman who sheds them. The Blenheims, infinitely distressed, jumped on her lap and endeavored to console her; rubbing their little red and white heads against her cheeks. Their caresses touched her in her loneliness. “We hated Cocky, you and I,” she said to them; “but I wish to heaven he had never died.” With all her keen enjoyment of life she really understood in that hour of torture how it was that women driven at bay killed themselves to escape detection and condemnation. She did not mean to kill herself because she was a woman of many resources and had her beautiful face and form, and loved life; but she felt that she would rather kill herself than meet Ronald’s eyes if he learned that the Indian diamond had been changed and pawned. And know it he must as soon as Hunt and Roskell’s assayer tested the stones. Beaumont had told her honestly that the imitation would deceive anyone, even a jeweler, unless it were tested; but that tested it would of course fly in pieces and confess itself a fraud. She had only forty-three hours before the messenger from the bank would come. Whatever she did had to be done before the stones were consigned to him, for after they were out of her possession she would not be safe for a moment. At all costs she must get back the roc’s egg from Beaumont or be a ruined, disgraced, miserable woman. True, she felt sure that her brother and the Ormes would not expose her to the world. They would scrape the money together at all costs, and redeem the jewel, and observe secrecy on the whole abominable affair; but she would be in their power for ever; they would be able to punish her in any way they chose, and their punishment would certainly take the form of exiling her from everything which made life worth living. The old churchman, Lord Augustus, was hardly more than a lay figure, but Alberic, she knew, looked on her with all the disdain and dislike of a refined and religious man, for one whom he condemned in all her ways and whom he considered had made his brother and his father dupes from the first day of her marriage. And Ronald would be but the more bitterly inflexible because he would consider that her near relationship to himself compelled him in honor to the uttermost severity in judgment and action; he would consider that he could not show to her the indulgence he might have shown to a stranger. Her fit of weeping exhausted itself by its own violence, and as she glanced at her face in the glass she was horrified to see her red and swollen eyelids and her complexion smudged and dulled like a pastel which some ignorant servant has dusted.