ing
of their disappearance.

'I know where those diamonds are, but I shan't tell while there is such
a fuss,' she had said, and in his abstraction he had scarcely noticed it
then, but it came back to him now with fearful significance, making him
sick, and faint, and cold, although the great drops of sweat stood
thickly upon his lips and under his hair, as, after the gas was lighted,
he sat alone in a little reception-room opening from one of the parlors.
Did Jerrie know where they were, and had she known all the time and not
spoken? And, if so, was she not guilty as an accessory, at least in
trying to shield another? For that she took them herself he never for a
moment dreamed. It was some one else, and she knew and did not tell. He
was certain of it now, as every incident connected with her strange
sickness came back to him, when she seemed to be doing penance for
another's fault. She had called herself an accessory, and that was what
she was, or rather what the world would call her, if it knew. To him she
was Jerrie, the girl he loved, and he would defend her to the bitter
end, no matter how culpable she had been in keeping silence so long.

But who took them! That was the question puzzling him so much as he sat
thinking with his head bent down, and so absorbed that he did not hear a
step in the adjoining room, or know that Peterkin had seated himself
just where a large mirror showed him distinctly the young man in the
next room, whom he recognized at once, though Harold never moved for a
few moments or lifted his head.

At last, however, he unbuttoned his coat and after glancing cautiously
around to make sure no one was near, he took the box from his pocket,
and holding the stones to the light examined them carefully, taking in
his hand first the ear-rings and then the pin, and holding them in such
a way that two or three times they flashed directly in the eyes of the
cruel man watching him.

'Yes, they are Mrs. Tracy's diamonds; there can be no mistake,' he
whispered, just as he became conscious that there was some one in the
door looking at him.

Quick as thought he put the box out of sight just as Peterkin's voice,
exultant and hateful, cried out:

'Hallo, Mr. Prayer-book! your piety won't let you keep back a darned
thing you know agin me, but it lets you have in your possession diamonds
which I'd eenamost sware was them stones Miss Tracy lost years ago and
suspected you of takin. I know the box anyway, I h