Flinging things into suit-cases and kit-bags next morning, he remembered that he had no little keepsake to take home to the mother, and ran out to ransack the shops crammed with glittering inutilities for something to please her. Under present impecunious circumstances, this could only be done by going home second-class, and Monte Carlo shops scarcely lend themselves to modest gifts; customers in that City of Dis are expected to reckon in golden four-louis pieces. It was a bewildering and irritating thing to a hurried man to review those windows, ablaze with diamonds and glowing with rubies, piled with rich-scented russia leathers, clasped and bound and fitted with gold and silver inconveniences of every description, or run the eye over daintily carved ivories, costly bric-à-brac, gorgeous apparel, and priceless lace, in search of something at once exquisite, suitable, and inexpensive. He was consigning the total merchandise of Monte Carlo to perdition, in a last and frantically hopeless marshalling of a jeweller's window, when his eye was caught by a necklace of costly gems and beautiful workmanship, at which he gazed in open-mouthed amazement for some seconds. The design, unusual and unmistakable, the jewels--sapphires set with diamonds--all were familiar and recognizable at a glance. It was an exact duplicate of the Somers sapphires, the necklace inherited by Agatha, and constituting her chief fortune, of the value of some thousands of pounds--the necklace she had often been counselled by outsiders to sell, but never by the family--and had always consistently refused to part with. She had worn that necklace at his coming-of-age dance, the day on which he had definitely recognized the nature of his feelings for her. It was spoken of in the family as her dowry. There it lay, sparkling and quivering in the clear morning sunlight, among stars, tiaras, collars, and _rivières_ of diamonds, and ornaments set with every known jewel. It shone out with a distinction all its own from these splendid and costly things, an exact counterpart of Agatha's necklace, here for sale, in this very Monte Carlo shop before his dazed eyes; the gems, winking and sparkling with many colours, seemed alive and beckoning to him, burdened with secrets they longed to tell. In a moment he was in the shop, stammering in unintelligible French, and pointing to the necklace. "Oui, oui, M'sieur; the sapphires are exceptionally fine and the diamonds of good water," the lady at the counter acknowledged; "the value being so great we are willing to take much less than they are worth. Yes; it is fresh in the window this morning. Second-hand? But naturally; the workmanship, very fine and of exquisite art, is long out of date. Such things are no longer made. It is absolutely unique."