re of Vishnu bent
backward into a circle, with a head of sapphire; two yellow stones for
the cheeks and the brain of him of the one blue. Just as a piece of
carving it is so fine that Cellini couldn't have equaled it, but no one
knows when or where it was made. The first that is known, the Shah Jehan
had it in his treasure-house. The story is he stole it, but, however
that may be, he gave it as a betrothal gift to his wife--possibly the
most beautiful"--his eyebrows signaled to Flora his uncertainty of that
fact--"without doubt the best-loved woman in the world. When she died it
was buried with her--not in the tomb itself, but in the Taj Mehal; and
for a century or so it lay there and gathered legends about it as thick
as dust. It was believed to be a talisman of good fortune--especially in
love.

"It had age; it had intrinsic value; it had beauty, and that one other
quality no man can resist--it was the only thing of its kind in the
world. At all events, it was too much for old Neville Crew, when he saw
it there some couple of hundred years ago. When he left India the ring
went with him. He never told how he got it, but lucky marriages came
with it, and the Crews would not take the House of Lords for it. Their
women have worn it ever since."

For a moment the wonder of the tale and the curious spark of excitement
it had produced in the teller kept the listeners silent. Clara was the
first to return to facts. "Then Bessie--" she prompted eagerly.

Kerr turned his glass in meditative fingers. "She wore it as young
Chatworth's wife." He held them all in an increasing tension, as if he
drew them toward him.

"The elder Chatworth, Lord Crew, is a bachelor, but, of course, the
ring reverted to him on Chatworth's death."

"And Lord only knows," the judge broke in, "how it got shipped with
Bessie's property. Crew was out of England at the time. He kept the
wires hot about it, and they managed to keep the fact of what the ring
was quiet--but it got out to-day when Purdie found it was gone. You see
he was showing it--and without special permission."

Flora had a bewildered feeling that this judicial summing up of facts
wasn't the sort of thing the evening had led up to. She couldn't see, if
this was what it amounted to, why Harry had changed his mind about
telling them at the dinner table. She could not even understand where
this belonged in the march of events in their story, but Clara took it
up, clipped it out, and fit