It was hers! She did not believe it. It had been done too quickly. It seemed to her she had hardly felt Harry slip it on her finger before they had left the shop; that she had hardly shaken off the musty inclosed atmosphere, before Harry had left her on the corner of California and Powell Streets—left her alone with the ring! Still, she didn't believe she had it, even while she looked at the large lump it made under her glove. She kept feeling it with a cautious finger-tip.

A trio of girls she knew flocked off the California Street car and surrounded her. They were going to the White House for bargains in shirt waists. They wanted to carry her off in their company. They encompassed her in a chatter of lace and lingerie. There were held up to her all the interests of her every-day existence; but these seemed to have no part in her real life. They had never appeared more remote and trivial. She kept her conscious hand in the folds of her skirt. She would have liked to strip off her glove and show them the ring. It would have entertained them so much. To herself its entertainment was of the Arabian Nights—the way of its finding, its beauty in the false setting, the struggle over it in the shop—all were wine to her imagination. It was a thing to conjure adventure; it was a talisman of romance.

She colored faintly as she mentally corrected herself. It was her engagement ring, and as such she had never once thought of it. Strange, when all the forms of her engagement had been so well observed; when Harry himself represented that side of life to which she had tried to form herself from as far back as the old days when her mother had made fun of her fancies. It must be right, she thought, this life of conventions and forms; and the queer way she saw things, something wrong in her. But because she knew herself different, and because she felt life without understanding it, she feared it. It was too big to take hold of alone. And she was so alone; and Harry was so strong, so matter-of-fact; alone like herself, yet adequate in the world she was afraid of. She had accepted him as naturally, and yet as unreally, as she took all that life, and to the moment she had never questioned the wisdom or the happiness. She didn't question now. She only was shocked that so large a fact in her life as her engagement could be completely wiped out for the moment by a thing so trivial. It was not even the ring. It was the feeling she had about the ring. Her imagination was always running away with her, as it had the night at the club. And here it was, still uncurbed, speeding her forward into fields of romance.

She went over whole dramas—imaginary histories of chance and circumstance—woven about the ring, as she walked up and down the long, windy hills, westward and homeward, the blue bay on the one hand beaten green under the rising "trade," and the fog coming in before her. With the experience of the morning, and the exercise and the lively air, her spirits were riding high. From time to time she had the greatest longing to peep again at the sapphire, but not until the house door had closed after her did she dare draw off her glove and look. It was still glorious. What a pity she must take it off! Yet that point Harry had made about not showing it had been too sharp to be disregarded. But what could she say, supposing Clara asked about the morning's expedition? At this thought all her spring deserted her, and she went slowly up the stair. Perhaps Clara had forgotten about it, and then it recurred reassuringly to her mind how seldom Clara touched anywhere near the subject of her engagement.

None the less, she went very softly down the hall, anxious lest Clara might open her door and ask what she had brought home with her.

But even in the refuge of her own rooms the ring encircled Flora with unease. The light of it on her finger made her restless. It wasn't that she was apprehensive of it, but she could not forget it. She could hear the maid Marrika moving about in the room beyond. She could hear the rustle of clothes carried to and fro. She knew there were things to dress for—a luncheon, and a bevy of teas—things which must be gone through with, things which at other times she had found sufficiently pleasurable. But now, try as she would to turn her mind to these, it persistently wandered back to the jewel. All the fine, simple pleasure of the morning was dazzled out by it. She slipped it off her finger on to the dressing-table, and it lay among her laces like a purple prism, cast by some unearthly sun in a magic glass. She had jewels, rubies even—the most precious—but nothing that gave her this sense of individual beauty, of beauty so keen as to be disturbing. She emptied her jewel casket in a glittering heap around it. It shone out unquenched. It had not been the dingy little shop, and the dingy little street, and the odds and ends of jade and tarnished silver that had made it of such a value. It seemed to her that any eye would fix it, any hand pluck it out first from that shining heap before her.

Marrika was coming in, and quickly Flora swept the jewels and the sapphire back into the casket, turned the key upon them, and thrust it back in the far corner of the drawer. She would give every one a great surprise when the ring was properly set. She glanced nervously over her shoulder to see if Marrika had noticed her action. The Russian had been moving to and fro between the wardrobe and the dressing-table with a droning thread of song. And now she took up the combs and brushes, and filling her mouth with pins, began on the long river of yellow-brown hair that flowed down Flora's back. The broad, pale face reflected beside her own in the mirror was reassuring by its serene indifference. She had soothing hands, Marrika. It was a luxury to be dressed by her, a mental soporific. But to-day it wrought no relaxation in Flora's tightened nerves. All the while she was being combed and laced and hooked her eyes were alertly on the dressing-table drawer, that remained a little open; and presently she caught herself vaguely speculating on how, after she had been fastened up and into her clothes so securely, she could dispose upon herself the sapphire. How had she arrived at this consideration? No course of reasoning led up to it. She was annoyed with herself. If she wasn't going to wear the ring on her finger, and show it, why did she want to take it with her at all? For fear it might be lost? Lost, in her jewel box, in the back of the drawer! She blushed for herself. She looked severely at her guilty reflection in the mirror. Perhaps she did look tall; yes, and outwardly sophisticated, but underneath that bold exterior Flora knew she was only the smallest, youngest, most ridiculous child ever born. There were moments when this fact appeared to her more vividly than at others. One had been the other night when Kerr's eyes had looked through and through her; and here she was again, when she was going to a girls' luncheon, and most wanted to feel competent, stared out of countenance by the wonderful eye of a ring.

Through the long afternoon it was more apparent to her than the faces of the people around her. She was restless to get back to it, but people talked interminably. At the luncheon they talked of Kerr. Flora knew these girls felt a little resentment that she had so easily captured Harry Cressy; for Harry had been more than an eligible man in the little city. He had been an eligible personage. Not that he had money; not that his family tree was plainly planted in their midst; but that without these two things he had achieved what, with these things, the people he knew were all striving for. He stood before them as the embodiment of what they most believed in—perfect bodily splendor, and perfect knowledge of how to get on with the world; and the fact that he wouldn't quite be one of them, but after five years still stood a little off—made him shine with greater brilliance, especially in the eyes of these young girls. It was hard, they seemed to feel, that such an apparently remote and difficult person should have succumbed so easily; and now that a new luminary of equal luster was apparent in their sky, Flora felt their remarks a little triumphantly aimed at her. It was odd to her that they should envy her anything, especially those one or two exquisite flowers of old families, whose lovely eyes saw not one inch farther than her turquoise collar. And the way they talked of Kerr, with flourishes, made her feel a faint, responsive irritation that he had talked to so many of them in exactly the same way.

But between the threads of interest the table group wove together, kept flashing up her furtive desire to be away, to be at home, to see what had happened to the sapphire. Of course, she knew that nothing could have happened; but she wanted to look at it, to open the casket and see the flash of it before her eyes. For was she quite sure that it was not one of those fairy gifts, which, put into the hand in a blaze of beauty, may be found in the pocket as withered leaves? Yet her tenacious nets of duty caught and caught, and again caught her, so that when the carriage finally fetched her home it was between lighted street-lamps.

They were dining early that night on account of the Bullers' box party, but it was nearly eight o'clock before Flora reached the house. And it was, of course, for that reason that she ran up-stairs—ran wildly, regardlessly, before the eyes of Shima—and along the hall, her high heels clacking on the hard floors, and through her bedroom to the dressing-room, snatched open the table drawer, unlocked the casket with a twitch of the key—and, ah, it was there! It was really real! Why, what had she expected? She was laughing at herself.

She was gay in her relief at getting back to the sapphire, but at the same time she was already wondering what she should do about it that night—take it with her or leave it alone? Dared she wear it on her finger under her glove? Clara might notice the unfamiliar form of the jewel through the thin kid. Harry's warning had been phrased conventionally enough, but the hints his words conveyed had expanded in her mind—fear not only of Clara's laughter, that such a jewel had come from a junk shop, but of her wonder, her questions, her ability of getting out the story of the whole erratic proceeding, even to the strange pantomime between Harry and the blue-eyed Chinaman. Clara was marvelous!

Flora watched her curiously across the table that evening, wondering what was that quality of hers by which she acquired. Hitherto Flora had accepted it as a fact without question, but now she had a desire to place it. It was not beauty, for though Clara was pretty, like a polished Greuze, she was colorless and flavorless, lacking the vivid heat of magnetism. More probably it consisted in a certain sort of sweetness Clara could produce on occasions, a way she had of looking and speaking which Flora could only describe as smooth. But smooth without texture or softness; smooth as quick-flowing water, smooth as glass—a surface upon which even caution might lose its equilibrium. For the danger in Clara was that she was disarming. There was nothing antagonistic in her. One noticed her slowly. The flat tones of her voice made background for other people's conversations. The pale tints of her gown blended with the pale tones of her hair and flesh. Beside Clara's exquisite gradations Flora felt herself without shades, a creature of violent contrasts and impulses. If Clara had been going to carry the ring about with her she would have had a reason for it. But Flora had nothing but a silly fancy.

She made up her mind to leave the sapphire at home; but in her last moment in her room the resolution failed her. Harry, of course, would be angry if he knew, but Harry wouldn't see the thing under her glove.

She came down to where Clara was waiting for her, with the guilty feeling of a child who has concealed a contraband cake; but the way Clara looked her over made her conscious that she had not concealed her excitement. Clara was always cool. What would it be like, she wondered, to feel the same about everything? How would it seem to be no more elated by the expectation of listening to the most beautiful of tenors than over the next meeting of the Decade Club? Was that what she was coming to in time? Not to-night, she thought; and not, at least, while that talisman of romance clasped her around the third finger.