injure you for the world,
even if I could. Yet it does hurt to think our friendship in the past has
meant nothing to you, when it has meant so much to me. It hurts. But I
must bear it. I shall not trouble you about my feelings again."

If she had hoped that her meekness might make him relent she was
disappointed. He merely said, "Very good. We'll go back to where we
were."

That same evening Madalena wrote to Ruthven Smith. She took pains to
disguise her handwriting, and not satisfied with that precaution, went
out in a taxi and posted the letter in Hampstead.

It was a short letter, and it had no signature; but it made an impression
on Ruthven Smith.

CHAPTER XVI

WHY RUTHVEN SMITH WENT

Never in his life had Ruthven Smith been blessed or cursed by an
anonymous letter. He did not know what to make of it, or how to treat it.
Instead of exciting him, as it might had he been a man of mercurial
temperament, it irritated him intensely.

That was the way when things out of the ordinary happened to Ruthven
Smith: he resented them. He was not--and recognized the fact that he was
not--the type of man to whom things ought to happen. It was only one
strange streak of the artistic in his nature which made him a marvellous
judge of jewels, and attracted adventures to come near him.

He was constitutionally timid. He was conventional, and prim in his
thoughts of life and all he desired it to give. He was a creature of a
past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would
always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful
streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow
rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering opal in gray-brown
rock.

He loved jewels. He had known all about them by instinct even before he
knew by painstaking research. He could judge jewels and recognize them
under any disguise of cutting. He could do this better than almost any
one in the world, and he could do nothing else well; therefore it was
preordained that he should find his present position with some such firm
as the Van Vrecks; and, being in it, adventures were bound to come.

Many attempts to rob him had doubtless been made. One had lately
succeeded. His nerves were in a wretched state. He was "jumpy" by day as
well as night; and sometimes, when at his worst, he even felt for five
minutes at a time that he had better hand in his resignation to the firm
who ha