a flourish.
Why "famous"? It was very provoking to advertise with that vague
adjective and not explain it.

She turned indifferently to the first page. She read a sentence, re-read
it, read it again. Then, as if she could not read fast enough, her eyes
galloped down the column. Color came into her cheeks. The grasp of her
hands on the edges of the paper tightened. It was the most extraordinary
thing! She was bewildered with the feeling that what was blazing at her
from the columns of the paper was at once the wildest thing that could
possibly have happened, and yet the one most to have been expected.

For, from the first the business had been sinister, from as far back as
the tragedy--the end of poor young Chatworth and his wife--the Bessie,
who, before her English marriage, they had all known so well. Her death,
that had befallen in far Italian Alps, had made a sensation in their
little city, and the large announcements of auction that had followed
hard upon it had bred among the women who had known her a morbid
excitement, a feverish desire to buy, as if there might be some special
luck in them, the jewels of a woman who had so tragically died. They had
been ready to make a social affair of the private view held in the
"Maple Room" before the auction. And now the whole spectacular business
was capped by a sensation so dramatic as to strain credulity to its
limit. She could not believe it; yet here it was glaring at her from the
first page. Still--it might be an exaggeration, a mistake. She must go
back to the beginning and read it over slowly.

The striking of the hour hurried her. Shima's announcement of dinner
only sent her eyes faster down the page. But when, with a faint, smooth
rustle, Mrs. Britton came in, she let the paper fall. She always faced
her chaperon with a little nervousness, and with the same sense of
strangeness with which she so frequently regarded her house.

"It's fifteen minutes after eight," Mrs. Britton observed. "We would
better not wait any longer."

She took the place opposite Flora's at the round table. Flora sat down,
still holding the paper, flushed and bolt upright with her news.

"It's the most extraordinary thing!" she burst forth.

Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the
presence of the paper, and the suppressed excitement of her companion's
face--seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of her light eyes,
through all her smooth, pretty pe