Yes, she left the jewel there; but she locked her door and quickly, so that they must all have heard her before reaching their rooms.  Then she crossed to the window, which, like all on this side, opened on a balcony running the length of the house.  She was aware of this balcony, also of the fact that only young ladies slept in the corridor communicating with it.  But she was not quite sure that this one corridor accommodated them all.  If one of them should room elsewhere! (Miss Driscoll, for instance).  But no! the anxiety displayed for the safety of her jewel precluded that supposition.  Their hostess, if none of the others, was within access of this room and its open window.  But how about the rest?  Perhaps the lights would tell.  Eagerly the little schemer looked forth, and let her glances travel down the full length of the balcony.  Two separate beams of light shot across it as she looked, and presently another, and, after some waiting, a fourth.  But the fifth failed to appear.  This troubled her, but not seriously.  Two of the girls might be sleeping in one bed.

Drawing her shade, she finished her preparations for the night; then with her kimono on, lifted the pendant and thrust it into a small box she had taken from her trunk.  A curious smile, very unlike any she had shown to man or woman that day, gave a sarcastic lift to her lips, as with a slow and thoughtful manipulation of her dainty fingers she moved the jewel about in this small receptacle and then returned it, after one quick examining glance, to the very spot on the dresser from which she had taken it.  “If only the madness is great enough!” that smile seemed to say.  Truly, it was much to hope for, but a chance is a chance; and comforting herself with the thought, Miss Strange put out her light, and, with a hasty raising of the shade she had previously pulled down, took a final look at the prospect.

Its aspect made her shudder.  A low fog was rising from the meadows in the far distance, and its ghostliness under the moon woke all sorts of uncanny images in her excited mind.  To escape them she crept into bed where she lay with her eyes on the end of her dresser.  She had closed that half of the French window over which she had drawn the shade; but she had left ajar the one giving free access to the jewels; and when she was not watching the scintillation of her sapphires in the moonlight, she was dwelling in fixed attention on this narrow opening.

But nothing happened, and two o’clock, then three o’clock struck, without a dimming of the blue scintillations on the end of her dresser.  Then she suddenly sat up.  Not that she heard anything new, but that a thought had come to her.  “If an attempt is made,” so she murmured softly to herself, “it will be by—­” She did not finish.  Something—­she could not call it sound—­set her heart beating tumultuously, and listening—­listening—­watching—­ watching—­she followed in her imagination the approach down the balcony of an almost inaudible step, not daring to move herself, it seemed so near, but waiting with eyes fixed, for the shadow which must fall across the shade she had failed to raise over that half of the swinging window she had so carefully left shut.