dame Beattie chuckled. Her worn yellowed face broke into satirical
lines, hateful ones, Lydia thought. She was like a jeering unpleasant
person carved for a cathedral and set up among the saints.

"I'll tell you about my necklace," said she. "I'm perfectly willing to.
Perhaps you can do something about it. Something for me, too."

It was a strange, vivid picture: that small arc of light augmenting the
dusk about them, and Lydia sitting rapt in expectation while Madame
Beattie's yellowed face lay upon the obscurity, an amazing portraiture
against the dark. It was a picture of a perfect consistency, of youth
and innocence and need coming to the sybil for a reading of the leaves
of life.

"You see, my dear," said Madame Beattie, "years ago I had a necklace
given me--diamonds." She said it with emotion even. No one ever heard
her rehearse her triumphs on the lyric stage. They were the foundation
of such dignity as her life had known; but the gewgaws time had flung at
her she did like, in these lean years, to finger over. "It was given me
by a Royal Personage. He had to do a great many clever things to get
ahead of his government and his exchequer to give me such a necklace.
But he did."

"Why did he?" Lydia asked.

It was an innocent question designed to keep the sybil going. Madame
Beattie's eyes narrowed slightly. You could see what she had been in the
day of her power.

"He had to," said she, with an admiringly dramatic simplicity. "I wanted
it."

"But--" began Lydia, and Madame Beattie put up a small hand with a
gesture of rebuttal.

"Well, time went on, and he needed the necklace back. However, that
doesn't belong to the story. Some years ago, just before your Jeff got
into trouble, I came over here to the States. I was singing then more or
less." A concentrated power, of even a noble sort, came into her face.
There was bitterness too, for she had to remember how disastrous a
venture it had been. "I needed money, you understand. I couldn't have
got an audience over there. I thought here they might come to hear
me--to say they'd heard me--the younger generation--and see my jewels. I
hadn't many left. I'd sold most of them. Well, I was mistaken. I
couldn't get a house. The fools!" Scorn ate up her face alive and opened
it out, a sneering mask. They were fools indeed, she knew, who would not
stir the ashes of such embers in search of one spark left. "I'm a very
strong woman. But I rather broke down then. I came