able as
your pearls in safe keeping. After all, we know nothing of this Madame
Cagliostra, and Montmartre is what Parisians call an eccentric quarter."

Sylvia Bailey disliked very much taking off her pearls. Though she could
not have put the fact into words, this string of pearls was to her a
symbol of her freedom, almost of her womanhood.

As a child and young girl she had been under the close guardianship
of a stern father, and it was to please him that she had married the
rich, middle-aged man at Market Dalling whose adoration she had endured
rather than reciprocated. George Bailey also had been a determined
man--determined that his young wife should live his way, not hers.
During their brief married life he had heaped on her showy, rather than
beautiful, jewels; nothing of great value, nothing she could wear when in
mourning.

And then, four months after her husband's death, Sylvia's own aunt had
died and left her a thousand pounds. It was this legacy--which her
trustee, a young solicitor named William Chester, who was also a friend
and an admirer of hers, as well as her trustee, had been proposing to
invest in what he called "a remarkably good thing"--Mrs. Bailey had
insisted on squandering on a string of pearls!

Sylvia had become aware, in the subtle way in which Women become aware
of such things, that pearls were the fashion--in fact, in one sense,
"the only wear." She had noticed that most of the great ladies of the
neighbourhood of Market Dalling, those whom she saw on those occasions
when town and county meet, each wore a string of pearls. She had also
come to know that pearls seem to be the only gems which can be worn with
absolute propriety by a widow, and so, suddenly, she had made up her mind
to invest--she called it an "investment," while Chester called it an
"absurd extravagance"--in a string of pearls.

Bill Chester had done his very best to persuade her to give up her silly
notion, but she had held good; she had shown herself, at any rate on this
one occasion, and in spite of her kindly, yielding nature, obstinate.

This was why her beautiful pearls had become to Sylvia Bailey a symbol of
her freedom. The thousand pounds, invested as Bill Chester had meant to
invest it, would have brought her in L55 a year, so he had told her in a
grave, disapproving tone.

In return she had told him, the colour rushing into her pretty face, that
after all she had the right to do what she chose with her legacy