rson, before she reached for an
explanation.

"What is the most extraordinary thing?" The query came bland and smooth,
as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.

"Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon it simply
vanished! And--and it was all our own crowd who were there!"

"Vanished!" Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard in the face of
this extraordinary statement. "Stolen, do you mean?" She made it
definite.

Flora flung out her hands.

"Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room, in the middle of the
afternoon, when everybody was there--and they haven't the faintest
clue."

"But how?" For a moment the preposterous fact left Clara too quick to be
calm.

Again Flora's eloquent hands. "That is it! It was in a case like all the
other jewels. Harry saw it"--she glanced at the paper--"as late as four
o'clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it was
gone."

Flora leaned forward on her elbows, chin in hands. No two could have
differed more than these two women in their blondness and their
prettiness and their wonder. For Clara was sharp and pale, with silvery
lights in eyes and hair, and confronted the facts with an alert and
calculating observation; but Flora was tawny, toned from brown to ivory
through all the gamut of gold--hair color of a panther's hide, eyes dark
hazel, glinting through dust-colored lashes, chin round like a fruit.
The pressure of her fingers accented the slight uptilt of her brows to
elfishness, and her look was introspective. She might, instead of
wondering on the outside, have been the very center of the mystery
itself, toying with unthinkable possibilities of revelation. She looked
far over the head of Clara Britton's annoyance that there should be no
clue.

"Why, don't you see," she pointed out, "that is just the fun of it? It
might be anybody. It might be you, or me, or Ella Buller. Though I would
much prefer to think it was some one we didn't know so well--some one
strange and fascinating, who will presently go slipping out the Golden
Gate in a little junk boat, so that no one need be embarrassed."

Clara looked back with extraordinary intentness.

"Oh, it's not possible the thing is stolen. There's some mistake! And if
it were"--her eyes seemed to open a little wider to take in this
possibility--"they will have detectives all around the water front by
to-night. Any one would find it difficult to get away," she pointed out.
"Y