“Mr. Fairbrother! Pardon me, but I want to tell you something about that big diamond of yours. You have been in and have not been able to read your letters, so do not know that your wife has had some trouble with that diamond. People have said that it is not a real stone, but a well-executed imitation. May I write to her that this is a mistake, that it is all you have ever claimed for it—that is, an unusually large diamond of the first water?” I listened in amazement. Surely, this was an insidious way to get at the truth,—a woman’s way, but who would say it was not a wise one, the wisest, perhaps, which could be taken under the circumstances? What would his reply be? Would it show that he was as ignorant of his wife’s death as was generally believed, both by those about him here and those who knew him well in New York? Or would the question convey nothing further to him than the doubt—in itself an insult of the genuineness of that great stone which had been his pride? A murmur—that was all it could be called—broke from his fever-dried lips and died away in an inarticulate gasp. Then, suddenly, sharply, a cry broke from him, an intelligible cry, and we heard him say: “No imitation! no imitation! It was a sun! a glory! No other like it! It lit the air! it blazed, it burned! I see it now! I see—” There the passion succumbed, the strength failed; another murmur, another, and the great void of night which stretched over—I might almost say under us—was no more quiet or seemingly impenetrable than the silence of that moon-enveloped tent. Would he speak again? I did not think so. Would she even try to make him? I did not think this, either. But I did not know the woman. Softly her voice rose again. There was a dominating insistence in her tones, gentle as they were; the insistence of a healthy mind which seeks to control a weakened one. “You do not know of any imitation, then? It was the real stone you gave her. You are sure of it; you would be ready to swear to it if—say just yes or no,” she finished in gentle urgency. Evidently he was sinking again into unconsciousness, and she was just holding him back long enough for the necessary word. It came slowly and with a dragging intonation, but there was no mistaking the ring of truth with which he spoke. “Yes,” said he. When I heard the doctor’s voice and felt a movement in the canvas against which I leaned, I took the warning and stole back hurriedly to my quarters. I was scarcely settled, when the same group of three I had before watched silhouetted itself again against the moonlight. There was some talk, a mingling and separating of shadows; then the nurse glided back to her duties and the two men went toward the clump of trees where the horse had been tethered.