window, stood the object he was contemplating--my lady, having the
extract from the Colonel's Will in her hand, and keeping her back turned
on the whole of the company.

She faced me, when I asked for my instructions; and I saw the family
frown gathering over her eyes, and the family temper twitching at the
corners of her mouth.

"Come to my room in half an hour," she answered. "I shall have something
to say to you then."

With those words she went out. It was plain enough that she was posed
by the same difficulty which had posed Mr. Franklin and me in our
conference at the Shivering Sand. Was the legacy of the Moonstone a
proof that she had treated her brother with cruel injustice? or was it
a proof that he was worse than the worst she had ever thought of him?
Serious questions those for my lady to determine, while her daughter,
innocent of all knowledge of the Colonel's character, stood there with
the Colonel's birthday gift in her hand.

Before I could leave the room in my turn, Miss Rachel, always
considerate to the old servant who had been in the house when she was
born, stopped me. "Look, Gabriel!" she said, and flashed the jewel
before my eyes in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window.

Lord bless us! it WAS a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover's egg!
The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon.
When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep
that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed
unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and
thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the
sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out
of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. No
wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The
Diamond laid such a hold on ME that I burst out with as large an "O" as
the Bouncers themselves. The only one of us who kept his senses was Mr.
Godfrey. He put an arm round each of his sister's waists, and, looking
compassionately backwards and forwards between the Diamond and me, said,
"Carbon Betteredge! mere carbon, my good friend, after all!"

His object, I suppose, was to instruct me. All he did, however, was to
remind me of the dinner. I hobbled off to my army of waiters downstairs.
As I went out, Mr. Godfrey said, "Dear old Betteredge, I have the truest
regard for him!" He was embra