The necklace made a great heap of jewels on the buhl top of the table, above the intricate arabesque of silver and tortoise-shell.

It was nearly midnight.  Outside, the dull rumble of London seemed a sound, continuous, unvarying, as though it were the distant roar of a world turning in some stellar space.

It was a great old house in Park Lane, heavy and of that gloomy architecture with which the feeling of the English people, at an earlier time, had been so strangely in accord.  It stood before St. James’s Park oppressive and monumental, and now in the midst of yellow fog its heavy front was like a mausoleum.

But within, the house had been treated to a modern re-casting, not entirely independent of the vanity of wealth.

After the dinner at the Ritz, the girl felt that she could not go on; and Lady Mary’s party, on its way to the dancing, put her down at the door.  She gave the excuse of a crippling headache.  But it was a deeper, more profound aching that disturbed her.  She was before the tragic hour, appearing in the lives of many women, when suddenly, as by the opening of a door, one realizes the irrevocable aspect of a marriage of which the details are beginning to be arranged.  That hour in which a woman must consider, finally, the clipping of all threads, except the single one that shall cord her to a mate for life.

Until to-night, in spite of preparations on the way, the girl had not felt this marriage as inevitable.  Her aunt had pressed for it, subtly, invisibly, as an older woman is able to do.

Her situation was always, clearly before her.  She was alone in the world; with very little, almost nothing.  The estate her father inherited he had finally spent in making great explorations.  There was no unknown taste of the world that he had not undertaken to enter.  The final driblets of his fortune had gone into his last adventure in the Great Gobi Desert from which he had never returned.

The girl had been taken by this aunt in London, incredibly rich, but on the fringes of the fashionable society of England, which she longed to enter.  Even to the young girl, her aunt’s plan was visible.  With a great settlement, such as this ambitious woman could manage, the girl could be a duchess.

The marriage to Lord Eckhart in the diplomatic service, who would one day be a peer of England, had been a lure dangled unavailingly before her, until that night, when, on his return from India, he had carried her off her feet with his amazing incredible sacrifice.  It was the immense idealism, the immense romance of it that had swept her into this irrevocable thing.

She got up now, swiftly, as though she would again realize how the thing had happened and stooped over the table above the heap of jewels.  They were great pigeon-blood rubies, twenty-seven of them, fastened together with ancient crude gold work.  She lifted the long necklace until it hung with the last jewel on the table.