"You've had a what? What's that you're holding?" "That's the dream." "The dream? What are you talking about--it's a bag." "Precisely, it is a bag, and the bag's the dream." She observed him with a look in her big, wide open eyes which made them seem almost as if they were a child's. "Are you dreaming still, or am I?" She replied to his question with another. "Rupert, do you always believe every word I say?" "Well"--he made a sound as if he might have been clearing his throat--"that depends." "At least you must believe every word I am going to tell you now; you hear, Rupert, you must. You know what those people said last night about the things they had lost?" "Am I likely to have forgotten? Am I ever likely to forget?" "Rupert--now this is the part which you have to believe--I dreamt that all those things were in a leather bag which was in this chest." "Great Cæsar's ghost!" "The dream was so real that, when I woke, I had to come downstairs to see if it was true--and it was." "You don't mean it!" "There is the chest; in it was this bag; and in the bag I do believe are all the jewels which were lost--including my own. Isn't that--wonderful?" "It's more than wonderful, young woman, it's----" She put her small hand up to his lips and stopped him, commenting on his sentence as if it had been finished. "I quite agree with you, Rupert, it is delightful; nothing more fortunate could possibly have happened." CHAPTER XXI An Envelope What the various ladies who had spent the night at Avonham thought when their presence was desired in Lady Cantyre's boudoir, and they found spread out upon a table an amazing assemblage of triumphs of the jeweller's art, and the countess told them that story about the dream and the bag, was not quite clear. Because, in telling her tale, the countess made it plain, not only that criticism was not invited, but also that questions would be resented, and, more, not answered. When each lady was requested to choose her own property there ensued an animated scene. It was a regrettable fact that discussion actually arose as to who was the owner of certain trinkets. There were three diamond brooches; three ladies had lost a diamond brooch; the question arose as to which of those brooches belonged to each of them; before it was solved some very undesirable things had been said, and worse had been hinted. Nor was that the only instance of the kind; there were a couple of diamond pendants over which two ladies nearly came to blows. As one of them was unmistakably much the better of the two, it is difficult to evade the conclusion that one of them must have been a conscious liar, and, it is to be feared, even more than that.