hether justly or not, Madame Beattie would claim the
necklace, and how could Lydia know Jeff had not already paid her for it?
And Anne, soft, sweet Anne, what would she do if Lydia threw it in her
lap and said, "Look! I took it out of Esther's bag." She was thinking
very clearly, it seemed to her, and the solution that looked most like a
high business sagacity made it likely that she ought to carry it to
Alston Choate. He was her lawyer. And yet indeed he was not, for he did
nothing for her. He was only playing with her, to please Anne. But all
the while she was debating her feet carried her to the only person she
had known they would inevitably seek. She went directly upstairs to
Jeffrey's room where he might be writing at that hour.

He was there. His day's work had gone well. He was beginning to have the
sense the writer sometimes has, in a fortunate hour, of divine intention
in his task. Jeff was enjoying an egoistic interlude of feeling that the
things which had happened to him had been personally intended to bring
him to a certain deed. The richness of the world was crowding on him,
the bigness of it, the dangers. He could scarcely choose, among such
diversities, what to say. And dominating everything he had to say in the
compass of this one book was the sense of life, life at its full, and
the stupidity of calling such a world bare of wonders. And to him in his
half creative, half exulting dream came Lydia, her face drawn to an
extremity of what looked like apprehension. Or was it triumph? She might
have been under the influence of a drug that had induced in her a wild
excitement and at the same time strung her nerves to highest pitch.
Jeff, looking up at her, pushed his papers back.

"What is it?" he asked.

Lydia, for answer, moved up to his table and placed the parcel there
before him. It was the more shapeless and disordered from the warm
clutch of her despairing hand. He took it up and carelessly unrolled it.
The paper lay open in his palm; he saw and dropped the necklace to the
table. There it lay, glittering up at him. Lydia might have expected
some wondering or tragic exclamation; but she did not get it. He was
astonished. He said quite simply:

"Aunt Patricia's necklace." Then he looked up at her, and their eyes
met, hers with desperate expectation and his holding her gaze in an
unmoved questioning. "Did she give it to you?" he asked, and she shook
her head with a negation almost imperceptible. "No,"