The memory of Clara's incredulous glance remained with her as something curious, and she was not unprepared to be challenged when, the next morning, she hurried down the hall, drawing on her gloves. Clara's door did open, but the lady herself, yawning lightly on the threshold, had this time no questions for her. "Remember the luncheon," she advised, "and by the way, Ella wants us to sit in their box to-night. Don't forget to tell Harry."

Flora threw back a gay "All right," but she was in danger of forgetting even the object of their errand, once she and Harry were out in the bright glare of the street. The wind, keen and resinous from the wet Presidio woods, blew at their back down the short block of pavement, and buffeted them, broadside, as they waited on the corner for the slow-crawling little car. In spite of the blustering air Flora insisted on the side seat of the "dummy," and, catching her hat with one hand, pressing down her fluttering skirts with the other, she laughed, now sidelong at Harry, now out at the dancing face of the bay.

Each succeeding cross-street gave up a flash of blue water. The short blocks slid by, first stone fronts and fresh lawns, stucco and tiles; then here and there corner lots, the great gray, towered, wooden mansions the stock-brokers of the "seventies" built, and below them, like a contingent of shabby-genteel relations, the narrow gray wooden faces of what was "smart" in the "sixties". It was a continuous progress backward toward the old, the original town. There was no stately nucleus. This town was a succession of widening ripples of progress, each newer, more polished than the last, but not different in quality from the old center that still teemed—a region of frail wooden rookeries full of foreign contending interests, haunted with the adventures of its feverish past. It had built itself on the hopes of a moment, and what spread from it still was the spell of the new, the changing, and the reckless. It drew still from the ends of the earth. The broad road in over the mountains, the broad road out over the ocean made it where it stood, touching all trades, a road-house of the world.

Some dim perception of this touched Flora as the houses, gliding past, grew older, grayer, with steeper gardens, narrower streets, here and there even trees, lone, sentinel, at the edge of cobbled gutters. From the crest of the last hill they had looked a mile down the long gray throat of the street to where the ferry building lay stretched out with its one tall tower pricked up among the masts of shipping. Half-way between their momentary perch and the ferry slips the street suddenly thickened, darkened, swarmed, flying a yellow pennon high above blackened roofs. And now, as they slipped down the long decline into the foreign quarter the pungent oriental breath of Chinatown was blown up to them. She breathed it in readily. It was pleasant because it was strange, outlandish, suggesting a wide web of life beyond her own knowledge. She wondered what Harry was thinking of it, as he sat with his passive profile turned from her to the heathen street ahead. She guessed, by the curl of his nostril, that it was only present to him as an unpleasant odor to be got through as quickly as possible; but she was wrong. He had another thought. This time, oddly enough, a thought for her.

He gave it to her presently, abrupt, matter-of-fact, material. "That Chinese goldsmith down there has good stuff now and then. How'd you like to look in there before we go on to what-you-call-'em's,—the regular place?"

"You mean for a ring?" She was doubtful only of his being in earnest.

"You have so many of the Shrove kind," he explained. "I thought you might like it, Flora; you're so romantic!" he laughed."Like it!" she cried, too touched at his thought for her to resent the imputation. "I should love it! But I didn't know they had such things."

"Now and then—though it is a rare chance."

"But that will be just the fun of it," she hastened, half afraid lest Harry should change his mind, "to see if we can possibly find one that will be different from all these others."

She kept this little feeling of exploration close about her, as they left the car, a block above the green trees of the plaza, and entered one of the narrow streets that was not even a cross-street, but an alley, running to a bag's end, with balconies, green railings and narcissi taking the sun.

A slant-eyed baby in a mauve blouse stared after them; and a white face so poisoned in its badness that it gave Flora a start, peered at them from across the street. It made her shrink a little behind Harry's broad shoulder and take hold of his arm. The mere touch of that arm was security. His big presence, moving agilely beside her, seemed to fill the street with its strength, as if, by merely flinging out his arms, Samson-like, he could burst the dark walls asunder.

In the middle of the block, sunk a little back from the fronts of the others, the goldsmith's shop showed a single, filmed window; and the pale glow through it proclaimed that the worker in metals preferred another light to the sun's. The threshold was worn to a hollow that surprised the foot; and the interior into which it led them gloomed so suddenly around them after the broad sunlight, that it was a moment before they made out the little man behind the counter, sitting hunched up on a high stool.

"Hullo, Joe," said Harry, in the same voice that hailed his friends on the street-corners; but the goldsmith only nodded like a nodding mandarin, as if, without looking up, he took them in and sensed their errand. He wore a round, blue Chinese cap drawn over his crown; a pair of strange goggles like a mask over his eyes, and his little body seemed to poise as lightly on his high stool as a wisp, as if there were no more flesh in it than in his long, dry fingers that so marvelously manipulated the metal. Save for that glitter of gold on his glass plate, and the grin of a lighted brazier, all was dark, discolored and cluttered.

And the way Harry bloomed upon this background of dubious antiquity! He leaned on the little counter, which creaked under his weight, in his big, fresh coat, with his clear, fresh face bent above the shallow tray of trinkets—doubtful jades, dim-eyed rings, dull clasps and coins—his large, fastidious finger poked among. He was the one vital thing in the shop.

Over everything else was spread a dimness of age like dust. It enveloped the little man behind the counter, not with the frailness that belongs to human age, but with that weathered, polished hardness which time brings to antiques of wood and metal. Indeed, he appeared so like a carved idol in a curio shop that Flora was a little startled to find that he was looking at her. Chinamen had always seemed to her blank automatons; but this one looked keenly, pointedly, as if he personally took note. She told herself whimsically that perhaps it was his extraordinary glasses that gave point to that expression; and presently when he took them off she was surprised to see it seemed verily true. His little physiognomy had no more expression than a withered nut. But there was something about it more disturbing than its vanishing intelligence, something unexpected, and out of harmony with the rest of him, yet so illusive that, flit over him as her eye would, she failed to find it.

"Harry," she murmured to Cressy, who was still stirring the contents of the box with a disdainful forefinger, "this little man gives me the shivers."

"Old Joe?" Harry smiled indulgently. "He's a queer customer. Been quite a figurehead in Chinatown for twenty years. Say, Joe, heap bad!" and with the back of his hand he flicked the tray away from him.

The little man undoubled his knees and descended the stool. He stood breast-high behind the counter. He dropped a lack-luster eye to the box. "Velly nice," he murmured with vague, falling inflection.

"Oh, rotten!" Harry laughed at him.

"You no like?"

"No. No like. You got something else—something nice?"

"No." It was like a door closed in the face of their hope—that falling inflection, that blank of vacuity that settled over his face, and his whole drooping figure. He seemed to be only mutely awaiting their immediate departure to climb back again on his high stool. But Harry still leaned on the counter and grinned ingratiatingly. "Oh, Joe, you good flen'. You got something pretty—maybe?"

The curtain of vacuity parted just a crack—let through a gleam of intense intelligence. "Maybe." The goldsmith chuckled deeply, as if Harry had unwittingly perpetrated some joke—some particularly clever conjurer's trick. He sidled out behind the counter, past the grinning brazier, and shuffled into the back of the shop where he opened a door.

Flora had expected a cupboard, but the vista it gave upon was a long, black, incredibly narrow passage, that stretched away into gloom with all the suggestion of distance of a road going over a horizon. Down this the goldsmith went, with his straw slippers clapping on his heels, until his small figure merged in the gloom and presently disappeared altogether, and only the faint flipper-flap of his slippers came back growing more and more distant to them, and finally dying into silence. In the stillness that followed while they waited they could hear each other breathe. The little shop with the water-stained walls and the ancient odor—ancient as the empire of China—inclosed them like a spell cast around them by a vanishing enchanter to hold them there mute until his returning. They did not look at each other, but rather at the glowing brazier, at the gold on the glass plates, at the forms of people passing in the street, moving palely across the dim window pane, as distant to Flora's eye as though they moved in another world. Then came the flipper-flap of the goldsmith's slippers returning. The sound snapped their tension, and Harry laughed.

"Lord knows how far he went to get it!"

"Across the street?" Flora wondered.

"Or under it. And it won't be worth two bits when it gets here." He peered at the little man coming toward them down the passage, flapping and shuffling, and carrying, held before him in both hands, a square, deep little box.

It was a worn, nondescript box that he set down before them, but the jealous way he had carried it had suggested treasure, and Flora leaned eagerly forward as he raised the cover, half expecting the blaze of a jewel-case. She saw at first only dull shanks of metal tumbled one upon the other. But, after a moment's peering, between them she caught gleams of veritable light. Her fingers went in to retrieve a hoop of heavy silver, in the midst of which was sunk a flawed topaz. She admired a moment the play of light over the imperfection."But this isn't Chinese," she objected, turning her surprise on Harry.

"Lots of 'em aren't. These men glean everywhere. That's pretty." He held up a little circle of discolored but lusterful pearls—let it fall again, since it was worth only a glance. He leaned on the counter, indifferent to urge where value seemed so slight. He seemed amused at Flora's enthusiasm for clouded opals.

"They look well enough among this junk," he said, "but compare them with your own rings and you'll see the difference."

She heard him dreamily. She was wishing, as she turned over the tumble of damaged jewels, that things so pretty might have been perfect. To find a perfect thing in this place would be too extraordinary to hope for. Yet, taking up the next, and the next, she found herself wishing it might be this one—this cracked intaglio. No? Then this blue one—say. The setting spoke nothing for it. It was a plain, thin, round hoop of palpable brass, and the battered thing seemed almost too feeble to hold the solitary stone. But the stone! She looked it full in the eye, the big, blazing, blue eye of it. What was the matter with this one? A flaw? She held it to the light.

She felt Harry move behind her. She knew he couldn't but be looking at it. For how, by all that was marvelous, had she for a moment doubted it? Down to its very heart, which was near to black, it was clear fire, and outward toward the facets struck flaming hyacinth hues with zigzag white cross-lights that dazzled and mesmerized. Just the look of it—the marvelous deep well of its light—declared its truth.

"Harry," she breathed, without taking her gaze from the thing in her hand, "do look at this!"

She felt him lean closer. Then with an abrupt "Let's see it," he took it from her—held it to the light, laid it on his palm, looking sharply across the counter at the shopkeeper, then back at the ring with a long scrutiny. His face, too, had a flush of excitement.

"Is it—good?" Flora faltered."A sapphire," he said, and taking her third finger by the tip, he slid on the thin circle of metal.

She breathed high, looking down at the stone with eyes absorbed in the blue fire. There was none of the cupidity of women for jewels in her look. It was the intrinsic beauty of this drop of dark liquid light that had captured her. It had mystery, and her imagination woke to it—the wistful mystery of perfect beauty. And perfect beauty in such a place! It was too beautiful. The feeling it brought her was too sharp for pure pleasure. It was dimly like fear. Yet instinctively she shut her hand about the ring. She murmured out her wonder.

"How in the world did such a thing come here?"

"Oh, not so strange," Harry answered. He leaned on his elbow upon the counter, his head bent close to hers above the single, glittering point that drew the four eyes to one focus. "Sailors now and then pick up a thing of whose value they have no idea—get hard up, and pawn it—still without any idea. These chaps"—and his bold hand indicated the shopkeeper—"take in anything—that is, anything worth their while; and wait, and wait, and wait until they see just the moment—and turn it to account."

It might be because Harry's eyes were so taken with the jewel that his tongue ran recklessly. He had spoken low, but Flora sent an anxious glance to be sure the shopkeeper hadn't overheard. She had meant only to glance, but she found herself staring into eyes that stared back from the other side of the counter. That wide, unwinking scrutiny filled her whole vision. For an instant she saw nothing but the dance of scintillant pupils. Then, with a little gasp she clutched at her companion's arm.

"Oh, Harry!"

His glance came quickly round to her. "Why, what's the matter?"

She murmured, "That Chinaman has blue eyes."

He looked at her with good-natured wonder."Why, Flora, haven't you blue on the brain? I believe he has, though," he added, as he peered across the counter at the shopkeeper, whose gaze now fluttered under narrowed lids; "but why in the world should blue eyes scare you?" His look returned indulgently to Flora's face.

She could not explain her reason of fear to him. She could not explain it to herself more than that the eyes had seemed to know. What? She could not tell; but they had had a deadly intelligence. She only whispered back, "But he is awful!"

"Oh, I guess not," Harry grinned, and turned his back to the counter, "only part white. Makes him a little sharper at a bargain."

But, in spite of his off-handedness, Flora saw he was alert, touched with excitement. Once or twice he looked from the shopkeeper to the sapphire.

"Do you like it, Flora?" he said. "Do you want it?" He spoke eagerly against her reluctance.

"It is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, but—" She could not put it to him why she shrank from it. That feeling which had touched her at the first had a little expanded, the sense of the sapphire's sinister charm. She faltered out as much as she could explain. "It's too much for me."

His shoulders shook with appreciation of this. "Oh, I guess not! If you keep that up I shall be thinking you mean it is too much for me."

It hadn't been in the least what she meant, but now that he had suggested it to her—"Well, I shouldn't like it to be," she blushed, but she braved him.

The ring of his laughter filled the little, dark, old shop, and made the proprietor blink.

"Oh, I guess not," he said again, and with that he seemed to make an end of her hesitations. There was not another objection she could bring up. She let him draw the ring off her hand with a mingled feeling of reluctance and relief. She saw him turn briskly to the shopkeeper.

"Now, Joe, how much you want?" That much she heard as she turned away with a fear lest it might, and a hope that it would be, too much for him!

She lingered away to the door, through whose upper glazed half she saw the street swarming and sunny, picked out with streamers of red and squares of green. The murmur of traffic outside was faint to her ears. The murmur of the two voices talking on inside the shop momently grew fainter. She looked behind her and saw them now in the back of the shop, close by the grinning brazier.

The light of it showed what would have been otherwise dark. It showed her Harry, straddling, hands in pockets, hat thrust back, a silhouette as hard as if cast in cold metal. The aspect of him, thus, was strange, not quite unlike himself, but giving her the feeling that she had never known how much Harry smoothed over.

Perhaps men were always like that with men. Still she looked away again because she felt she had taken a liberty in catching him when he was coming out so plain and coming out so positive to the shopkeeper, whom he seemed really to be bullying. She felt that, considering the sapphire, nothing that went on about it could be too extraordinary. And yet the tone their voices were taking on made her nervous. Whatever they were arguing about, she found it hard to go on standing thus with her back to it, and for so long, while her expectancy tightened, and her unreasonable idea that she did not want the ring, more and more took hold of her. If he did not want to sell it, why not let it go—the beautiful thing!

She thought she would call Harry, and suggest it—but no. She hesitated. She would give them a chance to finish it themselves. She would count ten pigtails past the window first. She watched the last far into the distance, and still she was there, blowing hot and cold. She would call to Harry—call out to him from where she stood, that she wouldn't have the thing.

She turned, and there they were yet. They had not moved. The shadow of the gesticulating little Chinaman danced like a bird on the wall, and before him Harry glowed, immovable, but ruddy, as if the hard metal whereof he was cast was slowly heating through. The thought came to her then. Harry was iron! The hard shade of his profile on the wall, the stiff movement of his lips, the forward thrust of his head on his shoulders gave her another thought. Was Harry also brutal? The sight of that brutality awake, feeding, as it were, on the fluttering little figure before it, distressed her. How long were they going on putting an edge to their argument? There was continually with her the fear that it might sharpen into a quarrel; for now the goldsmith had ceased his gesticulation and became suddenly immobile, and still Harry was requiring of him the same thing. It was insisted upon, by all the lines of his stiff braced figure, and she had a fluttered expectancy that if the little man didn't do something quickly, now—now it would happen.

What she expected of Harry, a violent act or a quick relaxation of his iron mood, she had not time to consider, for the shopkeeper had moved. He was jerking his head, his thumb, and finally his arm in the direction of the long, dim passage—such a pointed direction, such a singular gesture, as to startle her with its incongruity. What had that to do with the price of the ring? And if it had nothing to do with the price of the ring, what had they been talking about? Her small scruple against knowing what was going on behind her was forgotten. Indeed, now she was oblivious of everything else. She was taking it in with all her eyes, when Harry turned and looked at her. And, oddly enough, she thought he looked as if he wondered how she came there. She saw him return to it slowly. Then, in a flash, he met her brilliantly. He came toward her out of the gloom, holding the ring before him, as if with the light of that, and the flash of his smile, he was anxious immediately to cover his deficit.

"I had the very devil of a time getting it," he said. "The little beggar didn't want to let me have it." But there was a subsiding excitement in his face, and a something in his manner, both triumphant and troubled, which his explanation did not reasonably account for. Had Harry felt the touch of the same strange influence that the little shop, and the blue-eyed Chinaman, and the sapphire, had wrought around her? Or was it something more salient, the same thing that had suggested itself to her with the violent gesticulation of the shopkeeper at the passage—that some question other than the mere transfer of the ring had come up between them?

"Harry"—she hesitated—"are you quite sure it's all right?"

"All right?" The sudden edge in his voice made her look at him. "Why, it's genuine, if that's what you mean."

It hadn't been, quite; but her meaning was too vague to put into words—a mere sensation of uneasiness. She watched Harry turn the ring over, as if he were reluctant to let it go out of his hands. And then, looking at her, she thought his glance was a little uncertain. She thought he hesitated, and when he finally slid the ring over her finger, "I wouldn't wear it until it is reset," he said. "That setting isn't gold. It's hardly decent."

"Yes," she assented; "Clara will laugh at us."

"She won't if we don't show it to her until it's fit to appear. In fact, I would rather you wouldn't. As it is now, the thing doesn't represent my gift to you."

She felt this was Harry's conventional streak asserting itself. But even she had to admit that an engagement ring which was palpably not gold was rather out of the way.

"You'd better keep it a day or two and look it over and make up your mind how you want it set, and then we'll spring it on them," he advised.

But now it was finally on her finger, she did not want to think it would ever have to be taken off again. She drew her glove over it. The great facets showed sharp angles under the thin kid. She wished the sapphire were not quite so large, so difficult to reconcile with everything else. Now that she had the perfect thing with her, clasping her so heavily around the third finger, she was half afraid it was going to be too much for her, after all.