e did not sleep together last night. You had to come into my room to
get my slippers. Why did you do this? What was in your mind, Caroline?"

A steady look, a low laugh choked with many emotions answered her.

"Do you want me to reply, Alicia? Or shall we let it pass?"

"Answer!"

It was Mr. Driscoll who spoke. Alicia had shrunk back, almost to where a
little figure was cowering with wide eyes fixed in something like terror
on the aroused father's face.

"Then hear me," murmured the girl, entrapped and suddenly desperate. "I
wore Alicia's slippers and I took the jewels, because it was time that
an end should come to your mutual dissimulation. The love I once felt
for her she has herself deliberately killed. I had a lover--she took
him. I had faith in life, in honour, and in friendship. She destroyed
all. A thief--she has dared to aspire to him! And you condoned her
fault. You, with your craven restoration of her booty, thought the
matter cleared and her a fit mate for a man of highest honour."

"Miss West,"--no one had ever heard that tone in Mr. Driscoll's voice
before, "before you say another word calculated to mislead these ladies,
let me say that this hand never returned any one's booty or had anything
to do with the restoration of any abstracted article. You have been
caught in a net, Miss West, from which you cannot escape by slandering
my innocent daughter."

"Innocent!" All the tragedy latent in this peculiar girl's nature blazed
forth in the word. "Alicia, face me. Are you innocent? Who took the
Dempsey corals, and that diamond from the Tiffany tray?"

"It is not necessary for Alicia to answer," the father interposed with
not unnatural heat. "Miss West stands self-convicted."

"How about Lady Paget's scarf? I was not there that night."

"You are a woman of wiles. That could be managed by one bent on an
elaborate scheme of revenge."

"And so could the abstraction of Mrs. Barnum's five-hundred-dollar
handkerchief by one who sat in the next box," chimed in Miss Hughson,
edging away from the friend to whose honour she would have pinned her
faith an hour before. "I remember now seeing her lean over the railing
to adjust the old lady's shawl."

With a start, Caroline West turned a tragic gaze upon the speaker.

"You think me guilty of all because of what I did last night?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"And you, Anna?"

"Alicia has my sympathy," murmured Miss Benedict.

Yet the wild girl persisted.

"But