ooking about the room, and, like
a person recovering after a heavy blow, wondering what had happened.
Then her hand, as with her first waking thought it had done for the last
week, went to the locket chain around her neck. Oh, yes, yes; she had
forgotten. The sapphire was gone. Gone by fraud, gone at a kiss for ever
with Harry--no, with Farrell Wand.

For Harry was not Harry; and Kerr was not Farrell Wand. He was indeed an
unknown quantity. Since she had found Harry she had lost both Kerr's
name and his place in her fairy-tale. She had seen his very demeanor
change before her eyes. Indeed, her hour had come without her knowing
it. The spell had been snapped which had made him wear the semblance of
evil. His sinister form was dissolving; but what was to be his identity
when finally he stood before her restored and perfect? If he were not
the thief whom she had struggled so to shield, why, then he was that
very strength of law and right which, for his sake, she had betrayed.

She sat up quickened with humiliation. The thing was not a tragedy, it
was a grotesque. Blushing more and more crimson, struggling with strange
mingled crying and laughter, she slipped out of the bed, and, still in
her nightgown, ran down the hall, and knocked on Mrs. Herrick's door,
until the dismayed lady opened it.

"I thought it was he," Flora gasped. "I thought it was he who had taken
the ring! Why didn't he tell me? Why did he keep it secret? I would have
done anything to have saved it for him, and I let Harry get it! Oh,
isn't it cruel? Isn't it pitiful? Isn't it ridiculous?"

Mrs. Herrick, who, for the last thirty-six hours, had so departed from
her curriculum of safety, and courageously met many strange appearances,
now was to hear stranger facts. For Flora had let go completely, and
Mrs. Herrick, without hinting at hysterics, let her laugh, let her cry,
let her tell piece by piece, as she could, the story of the two men,
from the night when Kerr had spoken so strangely at the club on the
virtues of thieves to the moment when, in the willow walk, they
discovered that the jewel was gone. Clara's part in the affair, and the
price she had exacted, even in this unnerved moment, Flora's instinct
withheld, to save Mrs. Herrick the last cruelest touch. But for the
rest--she let Mrs. Herrick have it all--and under the shadow of the grim
facts the two women clung together, as if to make sure of their own
identities.

"I don't even know who he is