ss Jeff--you, Jeff dear--unless Jeff
makes himself responsible for my future, I propose to tell the whole
story of the necklace in print and make these two young women wish I
hadn't. Better protect them, Jeff. Better make yourself responsible for
Aunt Patricia."

"You propose telling it in print," said Jeff slowly. "You said so
yesterday. But I ought to have warned you then that Weedon Moore won't
print it--not after I've seen him. He knows I'd wring his neck."

"There are plenty of channels," said Madame Beattie, with an unmoved
authority. "Journals here, journals abroad. Why, Jeff!" suddenly her
voice rose in a shrill note and startled them. Her face convulsed and a
deeper hue ran into it. "I'm a personage, Jeff. The world is my friend.
You seem to think because I've lost my voice I'm not Patricia Beattie.
But I am. I am Patricia Beattie. And I have power."

Lydia made a movement toward her and laid her hands together,
impetuously, in applause. Whether Madame Beattie were willing, as it had
seemed a second ago, to sacrifice her for the sake of squeezing money
out of Jeff, she did not care. Something dramatic in her discerned its
like in the other woman and responded. But Jeff, startled for an
instant, felt only the brutal impulse to tell Madame Beattie if the
world were so much her friend, it might support her. And here appeared
the last person any of them desired to see if they were to fight matters
to a finish: the colonel in his morning calm, his finger, even so early,
between the leaves of a book. As the year had waned and there was not
so much outside work to do he had betaken himself to his gentler
pursuits, and in the renewed health of his muscles felt himself a better
man. He had his turn of being startled, there was no doubt of that.
Esther here! his eyes were all for her. It meant something significant,
they seemed to say. Why, except for an emphatic reason, should she,
after this absence, have come to Jeff? He even seemed to be ignoring
Madame Beattie as he stepped forward to Esther, with outstretched hand.
There was a welcome in his manner, a pleasure it smote Lydia's heart to
see. She knew what the scene meant to him: some shadowy renewal of the
old certainties that had made Jeff's life like other men's. For an
instant under the spell of the colonel's belief, she saw Jeff going back
and loving Esther as if the break had never been. It seemed incredible
that any one could look at her as the colonel was l