on those or any premises; this party of Easter guests would not have
been invited to Valley House; and the Malindore diamond, sleeping away
its secret on Annesley's breast, would still be guarding his secret, too.

While the others were at church she had sent him the diamond by
Parker--the blue diamond, and the rose sapphire; her engagement ring
also; the pearls he had given her the day before their marriage, and all
his other gifts (except the wedding ring), which had not been stolen on
the night when the Annesley-Setons' silver went.

It had been a blow to open the box brought to his room by the maid
without a word of explanation--no lighter because it was deserved. It was
only less severe than had the wedding ring been with the rest.

And perhaps, Knight reflected, it would have been there had Annesley
known of another trick played upon her: those cleverly "reconstructed"
pearls, gleaming ropes of them, and paste diamonds added to her
collection only for the purpose of disappearing in the "burglary." A
hateful trick, but he had believed it necessary at the time, while
despising it.

Well, he was punished for everything at last--everything vile he had done
and thought in his whole life; even those things the White Rose did not
know!

He was young still, but he felt old--old in sin and old in hopelessness;
for youth cannot exist in a heart deprived of hope. It seemed to Knight
that his heart had been deprived of hope for years, yet suddenly he
recalled the fact that a few moments before--up to the time when he had
begun counting his sins one by one, like the devil's rosary--he had been
thinking with something akin to hope of the future.

"What if, after all----" he began to ask himself.

But stumbling unseeingly from avenue to path, and path to lawn, he had
wandered near the house.

By what seemed to him a strange coincidence he had come to a standstill
almost on the spot where he had stood last night when Annesley, at her
window, called him in.

She had loved him then! She had called him in to be forgiven. But her
forgiveness, divine as it was, white and wide-winged as the flight of a
dove--had not been wide enough to cover his guilt.

What a ghastly difference between last night and this! It was right that
the face of the moon, so bright then, should be veiled with ragged black
clouds. And yet, what if----

The man's eyes strained through the darkness of that dark hour before the
dawn.

"If her window