“My dear, it is on the bishop’s account I put this on.  You know his daughter is heiress of the great Valdez sapphire—­”

“Of course she is, and when he has the charge of a stone three times as big as yours, what’s the use of wearing it?  The ruby, dear Uncle Paul, please!”

She was desperately in earnest I could see, and considering the obligations which I am supposed to be under to her and Tom, it was but a little matter to yield, but it involved a good deal of extra trouble.  Studs, sleeve-links, watch-guard, all carefully selected to go with the sapphire, had to be changed, the emerald which I chose as a compromise requiring more florid accompaniments of a deeper tone of gold; and the dinner hour struck as I replaced my jewel case, the one relic left me of a once handsome fortune, in my fireproof safe.

The emerald looked very well that evening, however.  I kept my eyes upon it for comfort when Miss Panton proved trying.

She was a lean, yellow, dictatorial young person with no conversation.  I spoke of her father’s celebrated sapphires. “My sapphires,” she amended sourly; “though I am legally debarred from making any profitable use of them.”  She furthermore informed me that she viewed them as useless gauds, which ought to be disposed of for the benefit of the heathen.  I gave the subject up, and while she discoursed of the work of the Blue Ribbon Army among the Bosjesmans I tried to understand a certain dislocation in the arrangement of the table.  Surely we were more or less in number than we should be?  Opposite side all right.  Who was extra on ours?  I leaned forward.  Lady Landor on one side of Tom, on the other who?  I caught glimpses of plumes pink and green nodding over a dinner plate, and beneath them a pink nose in a green visage with a nutcracker chin altogether unknown to me.  A sharp gray eye shot a sideway glance down the table and caught me peeping, and I retreated, having only marked in addition two clawlike hands, with pointed ruffles and a mass of brilliant rings, making good play with a knife and fork.  Who was she?  At intervals a high acid voice could be heard addressing Tom, and a laugh that made me shudder; it had the quality of the scream of a bird of prey or the yell of a jackal.  I had heard that sort of laugh before, and it always made me feel like a defenseless rabbit.  Every time it sounded I saw Leta’s fan flutter more furiously and her manner grow more nervously animated.  Poor dear girl!  I never in all my recollection wished a dinner at an end so earnestly so as to assure her of my support and sympathy, though without the faintest conception why either should be required.

The ices at last.  A menu card folded in two was laid beside me.  I read it unobserved.  “Keep the B. from joining us in the drawing-room.”  The B.?  The bishop, of course.  With pleasure.  But why?  And how? That’s the question, never mind “why.”  Could I lure him into the library—­the billiard room—­the conservatory?  I doubted it, and I doubted still more what I should do with him when I got him there.