There is, in the heart of each gale of events, a storm center of quiet. It is the very deadlock of contending forces, in which the individual has space for breath and apprehension. Into this lull Flora fell panting from her last experience, more frightened by this false calm than by the whirlwind that had landed her there. Now she had time to mark the echoes of the storm about her, and to realize her position. Her absorption had peopled the world for her with four people at most. Now she had time to look at the larger aspect.

From the middle of her calm she saw many inexplicable appearances. She saw them everywhere, from the small round of Clara's movement to the larger wheel of the public aspect. Clara was taking tea with the Bullers, and the papers had ceased to mention the Crew Idol.

It had not even been a nine days' wonder. It had not dwindled. It had simply dropped from head-lines to nothing; and after the first murmur of astonishment at this strange vanishing, after a little vain conjecture as to the reason of it, the subject dropped out of the public mouth. The silence was so sudden it was like a suppression. To Flora it shadowed some forces working so secretly, so surely, that they had extinguished the light of publicity. They must be going on with concentrated and terrible activity in cycles, which perhaps had not yet touched her.

So, seeing Major Purdie among the crowd at some one's "afternoon" where she was pouring tea, she looked up at his cheerful face and high bald dome with a passionate curiosity. He knew why the press had been extinguished, and what they were doing in the dark. She knew where the sapphire was—and where the culprit was to be found. And to think that they could tell each other, if they would, each a tale the other would hardly dare believe. Amazing appearances! How far away, how foreign from the facts they covered! But Major Purdie had the best of it. He at least was doing his duty. He was standing stiffly on one side, while she hesitated between, trying desperately to push Kerr out of sight before she dared uncover the jewel. But he wouldn't move. In spite of all she had done, he wouldn't.

Across the room that very afternoon she caught the twinkle of his resisting smile. He had had her letter then for two days, and still he had come here, though he'd been bidden to stay away; though he had been warned to keep away from all places where she, or these people around her, might find him; though he had been implored to go, finally, as far away as the round surface of the world would let him.

By what he had heard and seen in the red room that night, he must know her warning had not been ridiculous. And there was another threat less apparent on the face of things, but evident enough to her. It was the change in Clara after she had begun her attack on the Bullers, her appearance of being busy with something, absorbed with, intent upon, something, which, if she had not secured it yet, at least she had well in reach. And that thing—suppose it had to do with the Crew Idol; and suppose Clara should play into Harry's hands!

For Kerr's escape Flora had been holding the ring, fighting off events, and yet all the while she had not wanted to lose the sight of him. Well, now, when she had made up her mind finally to resign herself to the dreariness of that, might he not at least have done his part of it and decently disappeared? So much he might have done for her. Instead of smiling at her across crowded tea-rooms, and obliquely glancing at her down decorous dinner-tables, and with the same fatal facility he had displayed in getting at her, now keeping away from her, out of all possible reach.

He was playing her own trick on her, but her chances for getting at him again were fewer than his had been with her. She could not besiege him in his abode; and in the places where they met, large houses crowded with people, the eye of the world was upon her. For how long had she forgotten it—she who had been all her life so deferential toward it! Even now she remembered it only because it interfered with what she wanted to do.

For the eye of her small society was very keenly upon Kerr. She realized, all at once, that he had become a personage; and then, by smiles, by lifted eyebrows, by glances, she gathered that her name was being linked with his. She was astonished. How could their luncheon together at the Purdies', their words that night in the opera box, their few minutes' talk in the shop, have crystallized into this gossip? It vexed her—alarmed her, how it had got about when she had seen him so seldom, had known him scarcely more than a week. It was simply in the air. It was in her attitude and in his, but how far it had gone she did not dream, until in the dense crowd of some one's at-home she caught the words of a young girl. The voice was so sweet and so prettily modulated that at its first notes Flora turned involuntarily to glimpse the speaker, a slender creature in a delicate mist of muslin, with an indeterminate chin and the cheek of a pale peach.

"Just think," Flora heard her saying, "he went to see her three times in two days, but to-day, did you notice, he wouldn't look at her until she went up and spoke to him. I don't see how a girl can! Harry Cressy—"

She moved away and the words were lost. Flora looked after her. For the moment she felt only scorn for the creatures who had clapped that interpretation upon her great responsibility. These people around her seemed poor indeed, absorbed only in petty considerations, and seeing everything down the narrow vista of the "correct." Her eyes followed the young girl's course through the room, easy to trace by her shining blond head, and the unusual deliciousness of her muslin gown. She stopped beside two women, and with a certain sense of pleasure and embarrassment Flora recognized one of them—Mrs. Herrick. She caught the lady's eye and bowed. Mrs. Herrick smiled, with a gracious inclination in which her graceful shoulders had a part.

It gave Flora the sense Mrs. Herrick's presence always brought her, of protection, or security, and the possibility of friendship finer than she had ever known. She started forward. But Mrs. Herrick, presenting instantly her profile, drew the young girl's hand through her arm and moved away.

Flora winced as if she had received a blow. The other people who had heard the same gossip of her had been, on account of it, all the more amused, and anxious to talk to her. But Mrs. Herrick, though she bowed and smiled, did not want her too near her daughter; perhaps, herself, would have preferred not to speak to her.

She felt herself judged—judged from the outside, it is true—but still there was justice in it. She had been flying in the face of custom, ignoring common good behavior, in short, sticking to her own convictions in defiance of the world's. And she must pay the penalty—the loss of the possibility of such a friend.

But it was hard, she thought, to pay the price without getting the thing she had paid for. It was more like a gamble in which she had staked all on a chance. And never had this chance appeared more improbable to her than now. For if Kerr valued the ring more than he valued his safety, what argument was left her? She thought—if only she had been a different sort of woman—the sort with whom men fall in love—ah, then she might have been able to make one further appeal to him—one that surely would not have failed.