No, I don't know whether it's stealing to take it from
you when you'd no business to have it anyway. I must ask some one."

Lydia was no longer pale with apprehension. The rose was on her cheek.
Her eyes glowed with mischief and the lust of battle. Once she darted a
little smiling look at Jeff. "Come on," it seemed to say. "I can't be
worse off than I am. Let's put her through her paces and get something
out of it--fun, at least."

Esther looked back at her in that pained forbearance which clothed her
like a transfiguring atmosphere. Then she drew a sharp breath.

"Jeff!" she said, turning to him.

The red had mounted to his forehead. He admired Lydia, and with some
wild impulse of his own, loved her bravado.

"Oh, come, Lydia," he said. "We can't talk like that. If Esther means to
be civil--"

Yet he did not think Esther meant to be civil. Only he was hard pushed
between the two, and said the thing that came to him. But it came empty
and went empty to them, and he knew it.

"She doesn't mean to be civil," said Lydia, still in her wicked
enjoyment. "I don't know what she does mean, but it's not to be nice to
me. And I don't know what she's come for--" here her old vision of Jeff
languishing unvisited in the dungeon of her fancy rose suddenly before
her and she ended hotly--"after all this time."

Again Esther turned to Jeff and spoke his name, as if summoning him in a
situation she could not, however courageous, meet alone. But Lydia had
thought of something else.

"I don't know what you can do to me," she said, "and I don't much care.
Except for Farvie and Anne. But I know this. If you can arrest me for
stealing from you something you'd stolen before, why then I shall say
right off I did it. And when I do it, I shall tell all I know about the
necklace and how you took it from Madame Beattie--and oh, my soul!" said
Lydia, rising from her chair and putting her finger tips together in an
unconsidered gesture, "there's Madame Beattie now."

Esther too rose, murder in her heart but still a solicitous sadness in
her eyes, and turned, following Lydia's gaze, to the steps where Denny
had drawn up and Madame Beattie was alighting from the victoria. Jeff,
going forward to meet her, took courage since Denny was not driving
away. Whatever Madame Beattie had come to do, she meant to make quick
work of it.

"Jeff," said Esther, at his elbow, "Jeff, I must go. This is too painful
for everybody. I can't bear it."

"That