She watched the movements of the hands of the little timepiece with intense anxiety. The tidal train arrived in Cannon Street at half-past nine. He might have been here by ten. It was twenty minutes past ten when the bell downstairs rang loudly. It was he! A few moments later a manservant ushered him into her presence; she had given orders that they should do so immediately on his arrival. He was hot from his journey and dusty, and had some of the smoke of funnel and engine upon him; he had never been more unlovely: he had his hat on his head as he entered and his overcoat on his shoulders; he took both off slowly as a man does in whose eyes good clothes are precious, and she watched them with her nerves strung to the highest pitch, yet her intense agitation not excluding a vivid anger at his want of ceremony. His coat carefully laid on a chair, and his gloves on the top of it, he came and sat down before her, square, solid, hard as a piece of old Roman masonry. “Well?” she said breathlessly. How cruel it was to keep her in such suspense! “It’s all right, my lady,” he replied briefly. She raised herself on her couch, animation and color returning to her face, light to her eyes, warmth to her face. “Oh, that is very good of you!” she exclaimed. “I am very grateful, indeed I am.” William Massarene laughed a little, deep down in his throat. “Gratitude don’t wash, my dear. I never took a red cent of it in change for any goods of mine.” “But I _am_ grateful,” she said, disconcerted and vaguely distressed. “It was very good of you. What have you done with them? Where are they?” He took a large packet out of his inner breast-pocket. “I had the tiara dismounted because ’twas safer to carry it so. You’ll know how to put it together, I guess.” With a scream of relief and delight she sprang up and seized the packet, tears of joy welling up into her eyes. “Verify ’em,” said Massarene, and she undid the parcel and saw once more the great dazzling egg diamond and all its lesser luminaries. He watched her as a tom-cat on the tiles with gloating eyes may watch some white graceful feline form walking amongst roses in a garden. “Verify ’em,” he repeated--“count ’em.” “I have, I have,” she said in her ecstasy. “They are the Otterbourne diamonds just as I gave them to Beaumont. Oh, my dear good man, how can I thank you?” He did not answer; he breathed so loudly and heavily that she thought he was going to have a fit, and she could not but wish that he might have one. Like a child with a toy she took the jewels and began fitting them together to make the ornament she had so often worn. “Oh, how can I ever be seen without them! It is so monstrous, so brutal to shut them up at Coutts’s unseen for all those years!” As soon as she had escaped from one danger she, woman-like, bewailed another affliction. “How did you get over Beaumont,” she asked: “was he disagreeable about me?”