aid she would remember him to her dying day; and
already... But had he not refused her the wherewithal to remember
him--the pearls she needed as the clou of her dear collection, the great
relic among relics?

"Would you trust me with your studs?" she asked him, in a voice that
could be heard throughout the quadrangle, with a smile that was for him
alone.

There was no help for it. He quickly extricated from his shirt-front the
black pearl and the pink. Her thanks had a special emphasis.

The MacQuern placed the Magic Canister before her on the table. She
pressed the outer sheath down on it. Then she inverted it so that the
contents fell into the false lid; then she opened it, looked into it,
and, exclaiming "Well, this is rather queer!" held it up so that the
audience whose intelligence she was insulting might see there was
nothing in it.

"Accidents," she said, "will happen in the best-regulated canisters!
But I think there is just a chance that I shall be able to restore your
property. Excuse me for a moment." She then shut the canister, released
the false lid, made several passes over it, opened it, looked into it
and said with a flourish "Now I can clear my character!" Again she went
among the crowd, attended by The MacQuern; and the loans--priceless now
because she had touched them--were in due course severally restored.
When she took the canister from her acolyte, only the two studs remained
in it.

Not since the night of her flitting from the Gibbs' humble home had
Zuleika thieved. Was she a back-slider? Would she rob the Duke, and his
heir-presumptive, and Tanville-Tankertons yet unborn? Alas, yes. But
what she now did was proof that she had qualms. And her way of doing it
showed that for legerdemain she had after all a natural aptitude which,
properly trained, might have won for her an honourable place in at least
the second rank of contemporary prestidigitators. With a gesture of her
disengaged hand, so swift as to be scarcely visible, she unhooked her
ear-rings and "passed" them into the canister. This she did as she
turned away from the crowd, on her way to the Duke. At the same moment,
in a manner technically not less good, though morally deplorable, she
withdrew the studs and "vanished" them into her bosom.

Was it triumph, or shame, or of both a little that so flushed her cheeks
as she stood before the man she had robbed? Or was it the excitement
of giving a present to the man she had loved? Certai