“The danger of sudden temptation to indulge the lawless appetites with which heredity has endued us—­me from the nameless forebears whom I never knew, you directly from parents both of whom boasted criminal records.”

“I don’t believe it!” Sofia declared, passionately—­“I can’t believe it, I won’t!  Even if you are—­”

She was going on to say “if you are my father,” but caught herself in time.  Had not Karslake warned her in his note:  “Your only safety now lies in his continuing to believe that you are unsuspicious.” She continued in a tempest of expostulation whose fury covered her break: 

“Even if you were once a thief and my mother—­my mother!—­everything vile, as you persist in trying to make me believe—­God knows why!—­it is possible I may still have failed to inherit your criminal tendencies; and not only possible, but true, if I know myself at all.  For I have never felt the temptation to steal that you insist I must have inherited from you—­nor any other inclination toward things as mean, contemptible, and dishonourable as they are dishonest!”

With only his slow, forbearing smile by way of comment, Victor heard her out, but when she paused to reassort her thoughts, lifted a temporizing hand.

“Not yet, perhaps,” he said, gently.  “There is always the first time with every rebel against man-made laws.  But, where the predisposition so indubitably exists, it is inevitable, soon or late it must come to you, my dear—­the time when the will is too weak, temptation too strong.  Against it we must be forever on our guard.”

“I am not afraid,” Sofia contended.

“Naturally; you will not be before the hour of ordeal which shall prove your strength or your weakness, your confidence in yourself, or my loving fears for you.”

Sofia gave a gesture of weariness and confusion.  What did it matter?  If he would have it so, let him:  it couldn’t affect the issue in any way, what he believed, or for his own purposes pretended to believe.  Had not Karslake promised ...

She tried to recall precisely what it was that Karslake had promised, but found her memory of a sudden singularly sluggish.  In fact, her mind seemed to have lost its marvellous clarity of those first moments after tasting the wine of China.  Small wonder, when one remembered the emotional strain she had experienced since early evening!

“Still,” she argued, stubbornly, “I don’t see what all this has to do with Lady Randolph West’s invitation.”

“Only that to accept means to expose you to the greatest temptation one can well imagine.”

Sofia stared blankly.  Her wits were working even more slowly and heavily than before.  And the glare in her eyes from the luminous sphere of crystal was irritating.  Almost without thinking, she lifted her glass again; when she put it down it was empty.

“The jewels of Lady Randolph West,” Victor went on to explain without her prompting, “are considered the most wonderful in England; always excepting, of course, the Crown jewels.”