“No, no, no; not till we’re honest!” she cried, in alarm. “I wouldn’t dare to, I couldn’t, until then.” “But we’re only what we have been. We can’t change it all in a day, can we—especially when there is so much behind?” “I want to be decent,” she cried, in a sort of muffled wail. “No, no; I can’t marry you, Jim, not yet. We may not be honest with other people, but we _must_ be honest with ourselves!” One of the policemen directing the street-traffic at Forty-Second Street glanced in at them, through the misty window, and smiled broadly. It seemed to remind her of other worlds, for she at once sat up more decorously. “Time! Time! we are losing time—and I have so much to tell you.” “Then give me your hand to hold, while you talk.” She hesitated for a half-laughing moment, and then surrendered it. “Now, tell me everything, from the first!” CHAPTER VIII “It’s the Blue Pear,” she said, hesitatingly, wondering how to begin—“which, of course, means nothing to you.” “And just what _is_ it, please?” “The Blue Pear, Jim, is a diamond. It’s a diamond that you and I, in some way or another, have got to get back!” “To get back? Then when did we lose it?” “_I_ lost it. That’s what I’ve got to tell you.” “Well, first tell me what it is,” he said, wondering at her seeming gaiety, not comprehending her nervous rebound from depression to exhilaration. “It’s a very odd diamond, and a very big diamond, only tinted with a pale blue coloring the same as the Hope Diamond is tinged with yellow. That’s how it came to get its name. But the odd thing about it is that, when it was cut in Amsterdam, rather than grind away a fifteen-carat irregularity, it was left in a sort of pear-shape. Even before it was mounted by Lalique, it sold in Paris for well over six thousand pounds. Later, in Rio de Janeiro, it brought something like seven thousand pounds. There it was given to a French actress by a Spanish-American coffee-king. It was an African stone, in the first place.” “But what’s all this geography for?” asked Durkin. “Wait, dear heart, and you’ll understand. The coffee-king quarrelled with the Paris woman. This woman, though, smuggled the stone back to France with her. It was sold there, a few months later, for about one-fourth its market value. Still later it was bought for a little under six thousand pounds, by the late Earl of Warton, who gave it to his younger daughter, Lady Margaret Singford, when she married young Cicely—Sir Charles Cicely, who was wounded the first year of the war, you remember. Well, Sir Charles didn’t like the setting—it had been made into a marquise ring of some sort—so he took it to Rene Lalique’s work-shop in Paris, and had it mounted after his own ideas.” “But who is Lalique?”