Mrs. Clephane closed her lids for an instant; she wanted to drop a curtain between herself and the stir and brightness, and to keep in her eyes the look of Anne’s as they fell on the pearls. The episode of the jewels had moved the mother strangely. It had brought Anne closer than a hundred confidences or endearments. As Kate sat there in the dark, she saw, detached against the blackness of her closed lids, a child stumbling with unsteady steps across a windy beach, a funny flushed child with sand in her hair and in the creases of her fat legs, who clutched to her breast something she was bringing to her mother. “It’s for mummy,” she said solemnly, opening her pink palms on a dead star-fish. Kate saw again the child’s rapturous look, and felt the throb of catching her up, star-fish and all, and devouring with kisses the rosy body and tousled head. In themselves the jewels were nothing. If Anne had handed her a bit of coal--or another dead star-fish--with that look and that intention, the gift would have seemed as priceless. Probably it would have been impossible to convey to Anne how indifferent her mother had grown to the Clephane jewels. In her other life--that confused intermediate life which now seemed so much more remote than the day when the little girl had given her the star-fish--jewels, she supposed, might have pleased her, as pretty clothes had, or flowers, or anything that flattered the eye. Yet she could never remember having regretted John Clephane’s jewels; and now they would have filled her with disgust, with abhorrence almost, had they not, in the interval, become Anne’s.... It was the girl who gave them their beauty, made them exquisite to the mother’s sight and touch, as though they had been a part of her daughter’s loveliness, the expression of something she could not speak. Mrs. Clephane suddenly exclaimed to herself: “I am rewarded!” It was a queer, almost blasphemous, fancy--but it came to her so. She was rewarded for having given up her daughter; if she had not, could she ever have known such a moment as this? She had been too careless and impetuous in her own youth to be worthy to form and guide this rare creature; and while she seemed to be rushing blindly to her destruction, Providence had saved the best part of her in saving Anne. All these scrupulous self-controlled people--Enid and Hendrik Drover, Fred Landers, even the arch enemy, old Mrs. Clephane--had taken up the task she had flung aside, and carried it out as she could never have done. And she had somehow run the mad course allotted to her, and come out of it sane and sound, to find them all waiting there to give her back her daughter. It was incredible, but there it was. She bowed her head in self-abasement.