"Sweet girl!" Ermengarde commented, thankful that the visit scheme had been frustrated. "I said this afternoon that I had no fortune," the woman of mystery observed presently, bringing in a morocco case from her room. "But I had forgotten this for the moment. It is a little fortune in itself; a thing that has been in our family since--oh, since nobody knows when." "Very probably, not even the people they were sneaked from," Ermengarde reflected. The light had been switched off, and they had been talking and dreaming in the firelight. The woman of mystery, a slender figure in dead creamy-white, bent to the hearth, and, throwing a handful of eucalyptus bark on the embers, made a leaping blaze in which some jewels in a necklace she drew from the morocco case flashed and quivered like live things. Ermengarde gave a long sigh of wonder and admiration, not untinged by vague longing, at the sight of this rich and beautiful piece of jewellery. "I never wear it," Agatha said, pensively regarding the gems flashing in her hands as she knelt in the hearth-glow. "How could I, dressing as I do, and of course ought to? And I do not suppose I ever shall. Yet one scarcely cares to part with an heir-loom--except under very serious pressure." "Put it on," Ermengarde said, and Agatha clasped the necklace round her full white throat, still kneeling and looking into the fire, the jewels quivering with the rise and fall of her breath. The foundation was a simple collar of lozenge-shaped sapphires, set thick with brilliants; sapphire drops set with brilliants began at the back below the collar and increased to a complicated interlacing of pendants in front, the largest and deepest being star-shaped, the sapphire centre of it unusually rich. The plain white woollen dress was not cut low enough to give the full effect of jewels on white and satiny skin, except to the throat collar and smaller pendants, but the sparkle and lustre they communicated to the finely-cut features and deep eyes was marvellous, while the indifference with which the necklace was worn and the far-away look often so characteristic of her face showed the wearer too deep in thought to care for trifles. "You are made to wear jewels," Ermengarde said. "How lovely! And how costly!" "They should be worth some thousands, I believe, and I must sell them--just as they are. I should like to keep part, if only one pendant. They are said to bring luck to our family." "And have brought you the luck of having to sell them?" She smiled rather sadly, spreading her hands to the glow and looking thoughtfully into the red chasms of burning wood, the diamonds winking and quivering in crimson and purple flashes in the light; then she drew a deep sigh.