Before I could leave the room in my turn, Miss Rachel, always considerate to the old servant who had been in the house when she was born, stopped me.  “Look, Gabriel!” she said, and flashed the jewel before my eyes in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window.

Lord bless us! it was a Diamond!  As large, or nearly, as a plover’s egg!  The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon.  When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else.  It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves.  We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.  No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated:  no wonder her cousins screamed.  The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an “O” as the Bouncers themselves.  The only one of us who kept his senses was Mr. Godfrey.  He put an arm round each of his sister’s waists, and, looking compassionately backwards and forwards between the Diamond and me, said, “Carbon Betteredge! mere carbon, my good friend, after all!”

His object, I suppose, was to instruct me.  All he did, however, was to remind me of the dinner.  I hobbled off to my army of waiters downstairs.  As I went out, Mr. Godfrey said, “Dear old Betteredge, I have the truest regard for him!” He was embracing his sisters, and ogling Miss Rachel, while he honoured me with that testimony of affection.  Something like a stock of love to draw on there!  Mr. Franklin was a perfect savage by comparison with him.

At the end of half an hour, I presented myself, as directed, in my lady’s room.

What passed between my mistress and me, on this occasion, was, in the main, a repetition of what had passed between Mr. Franklin and me at the Shivering Sand—­with this difference, that I took care to keep my own counsel about the jugglers, seeing that nothing had happened to justify me in alarming my lady on this head.  When I received my dismissal, I could see that she took the blackest view possible of the Colonel’s motives, and that she was bent on getting the Moonstone out of her daughter’s possession at the first opportunity.

On my way back to my own part of the house, I was encountered by Mr. Franklin.  He wanted to know if I had seen anything of his cousin Rachel.  I had seen nothing of her.  Could I tell him where his cousin Godfrey was?  I didn’t know; but I began to suspect that cousin Godfrey might not be far away from cousin Rachel.  Mr. Franklin’s suspicions apparently took the same turn.  He tugged hard at his beard, and went and shut himself up in the library with a bang of the door that had a world of meaning in it.