“Then hear me,” murmured the girl, entrapped and suddenly desperate.  “I wore Alicia’s slippers and I took the jewels, because it was time that an end should come to your mutual dissimulation.  The love I once felt for her she has herself deliberately killed.  I had a lover—­she took him.  I had faith in life, in honour, and in friendship.  She destroyed all.  A thief—­ she has dared to aspire to him!  And you condoned her fault.  You, with your craven restoration of her booty, thought the matter cleared and her a fit mate for a man of highest honour.”

“Miss West,”—­no one had ever heard that tone in Mr. Driscoll’s voice before, “before you say another word calculated to mislead these ladies, let me say that this hand never returned any one’s booty or had anything to do with the restoration of any abstracted article.  You have been caught in a net, Miss West, from which you cannot escape by slandering my innocent daughter.”

“Innocent!” All the tragedy latent in this peculiar girl’s nature blazed forth in the word.  “Alicia, face me.  Are you innocent?  Who took the Dempsey corals, and that diamond from the Tiffany tray?”

“It is not necessary for Alicia to answer,” the father interposed with not unnatural heat.  “Miss West stands self-convicted.”

“How about Lady Paget’s scarf?  I was not there that night.”

“You are a woman of wiles.  That could be managed by one bent on an elaborate scheme of revenge.”

“And so could the abstraction of Mrs. Barnum’s five-hundred-dollar handkerchief by one who sat in the next box,” chimed in Miss Hughson, edging away from the friend to whose honour she would have pinned her faith an hour before.  “I remember now seeing her lean over the railing to adjust the old lady’s shawl.”

With a start, Caroline West turned a tragic gaze upon the speaker.

“You think me guilty of all because of what I did last night?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“And you, Anna?”

“Alicia has my sympathy,” murmured Miss Benedict.

Yet the wild girl persisted.

“But I have told you my provocation.  You cannot believe that I am guilty of her sin; not if you look at her as I am looking now.”

But their glances hardly followed her pointing finger.  Her friends—­the comrades of her youth, the Inseparables with their secret oath—­one and all held themselves aloof, struck by the perfidy they were only just beginning to take in.  Smitten with despair, for these girls were her life, she gave one wild leap and sank on her knees before Alicia.

“O speak!” she began.  “Forgive me, and—­”

A tremble seized her throat; she ceased to speak and let fall her partially uplifted hands.  The cheery sound of men’s voices had drifted in from the terrace, and the figure of Captain Holliday could be seen passing by.  The shudder which shook Caroline West communicated itself to Alicia Driscoll, and the former rising quickly, the two women surveyed each other, possibly for the first time, with open soul and a complete understanding.