Carefully, so that the movement could not rouse suspicion in the mind of his exasperating visitor, he put his hand behind him and let it fall on the bag upon the table.  Once on it, his fingers worked with skill and that precision which is natural to fingers trained by practice on a musical instrument until they seem to have a real intelligence, scarcely dependent on the brain.

“I knew for whom the dear boy meant that jewel,” Mrs. Vanderlyn went on.  “He had bought it as a present for me on my birthday, which occurs tomorrow.”

Kreutzer nodded slowly, his fingers working, all the time, in Anna’s bag.  “Presents are sometimes made on birthdays,” he admitted.  “Well?”

“Happy in the thought that he had remembered me, I went out for my drive, leaving the box there on his table, just where I had found it.  When I reached the house again I found a note left for me by your daughter, saying that she had decided upon going from my house forever, that someday she hoped I would forgive her—­”

“What had she done?” said Kreutzer, in a dry voice, full of misery.

“Ah, that she did not say.”  Mrs. Vanderlyn paused now, with a fine sense of the dramatic.  “But immediately I looked again for that box and ring and they—­were gone!”

Kreutzer, pale, his forehead damp from perspiration of pure agony, as truly sweat of pain as any ever beaded on the brow of an excruciated prisoner upon the rack, looked at her with pleading eyes.  “Gone!  Madame, you do not think—­”

She smiled a bitter little smile.  There was, also, just a touch of triumph in it, such as small souls show when they are on the point of proving to another, even though a stranger, that they have been wrong in trusting someone, believing in some thing.  “My dear sir,” she said slowly, not from unwillingness to speak but to give emphasis, “what else can I think?  No one but my son, myself and Anna had been near that room—­”

Kreutzer straightened up as one whose shoulders have been stooped for the reception of a mighty load which, finally, has been fixed upon them.  “You have told him?”

“Not yet.”

“Ah, that is lucky....  I beg your pardon, Madame, you have dropped your handkerchief.”

The handkerchief had fallen not less than a minute before, and, instinctively, he had started forward, intending to restore it to her; but by that time the situation had begun to be quite clear to him—­ah, deadly clear to him!—­and, in a flash the strategy had come to him.  Knowing, then, that that dropped handkerchief would be essential to its execution, he had let it lie.

Mrs. Vanderlyn turned carelessly to raise the handkerchief, and, as she turned, he carried out his plan.  Quick as a flash, he slipped the box which held the ring, out of the bag and into his own pocket.  When she straightened up again, after having (with a flush, for he had seemed exceedingly polite, before) recovered her own handkerchief, she found him standing as he had stood, only, possibly, a little more erect than he had been, with some addition of calm dignity to his carriage, with a calmer look in his old eyes.