now she's hounded me?"

"She says so. She wants you to get into politics and into business and
pay her back."

"But that's what you've wanted me to do yourself."

"Oh," said Lydia, in a great breath of despairing love, "I want you to
do what you want to. I want you to sit here at this table and write.
Because then you look happy. And you don't look so any other time."

Jeff stood gazing at her in a compassion that brought a smart to his
eyes. This, a sad certainty told him, was love, the love that is
unthinking. She was suffocated by the pure desire to give the earth to
him and herself with it. What disaster might come from it to her or to
the earth, her lulled brain did not consider. The self-immolation of
passion had benumbed her. And now she looked at him beseechingly, as if
to beg him only not to scorn her gift. Her emotion transferred itself to
him. He must be the one to act; but disappointingly, he knew, with the
mind coming in to school disastrous feeling and warn it not again to
scale such heights or drop into such depths.

"Lydia," said he, "you must leave this thing here with me."

His hand indicated by a motion the hateful bauble that lay there
glittering at them.

"Why, yes," said she. "I've left it with you."

"I mean you must leave it altogether, the decision what to do with it,
even the fact of your having had anything whatever to do with it
yourself."

Lydia nodded, watching him. It had not occurred to her that there need
be any concealment. She had meant to indicate that to herself when she
walked so boldly down the front stairs and clanged the door and went
along the street with the parcel plainly in her hand. If there was a
slight drop in her expectation now, she did not show it. What she had
indeed believed was that Jeff would greet the necklace with an
incredulous joy and flaunt it in the face of Esther who had stolen it,
while he gave it back to Madame Beattie, who had preyed on him.

"Do you understand?" said he. "You mustn't speak of it."

"I shall have to tell," said Lydia, "if anybody asks me. If I didn't it
would be--queer."

"It's a great deal more than queer," said Jeff.

He smiled now, and she drew a happy breath. And he was amused, in a grim
way. He had been, for a long time, calling himself plain thief, and
taking no credit because his theft was what might have seemed a crime of
passion of a sort. He had put himself "outside ", and now this child had
committed a crime of p