Rosalie Ozanne kept her bed for a week or more. She had sunk into a sort of desolate lethargy of mind and body from which nothing could rouse her. Her mother was in despair. Richard Gardner was too ill to come to see the girl he loved, and he did not write. The blow that had fallen upon his promising and prosperous life seemed to have shattered his nerves and benumbed his initiative. He had no words of hope for Rosalie; so he said nothing. Thus, in silence and apart, the two were suffering their young agony of wrecked hopes and love laid on its bier.

Rosanne, meanwhile, to all appearances, went on her way rejoicing. For a moment, in the shock of mutual grief over Rosalie’s trouble, she and her mother had drawn nearer in spirit, and strange words of sorrow and sympathy, as though dragged from her very depths, had come faltering from the girl’s lips. But the next day all trace of such unaccustomed softness had disappeared. She was her gay, resilient self once more, bright and hard as the stones she loved to wear, and more reserved and withdrawn from her family than ever. She avoided both her mother and sister as much as possible, spending most of her time in her own room or with her friend Kitty Drummund. As usual, too, she was often out riding and driving but no longer with Denis Harlenden. Major Satchwell had been received back into the favour of her intimate friendship, and it was he who was always to be found riding or limping at her side.

Harlenden had not called at Tiptree House since the night when, after the Chilvers’ dinner-party, he had requested an interview with Mrs. Ozanne and been asked to wait until a more propitious moment. Indeed, the latter, with mind full of foreboding and sorrow for her stricken child, had almost forgotten that he had ever made such a request. But Rosanne had not forgotten. And Rosanne knew why her lover stayed away from Tiptree House. He had made his reason sufficiently clear in a letter she had received the morning after their last meeting in the veranda. The terse sentences of that letter were like himself cold and quiet without, but with the burn of hidden fires beneath the surface.

“Until you are prepared to let the world know how things are with us, I shall not come again. And another thing, Rosanne: I love you. Your kiss is on my lips, and no other woman’s lips shall ever efface its exquisite memory You love me, too, I think. But do you love me more than certain other things? If not, and if you cannot be the Rosanne I wish you to be, caring only for such things as are worthy of your beauty and my pride, this love of ours can never come to its perfection but will have to be rooted out and crushed as a useless, hopeless thing. When you see this as I do, send for me. I shall not be long in coming.”

Curiously enigmatic words if read by any but the eyes for which they were intended. But Rosanne knew what they meant, and read them with her teeth dug into her lip and cheeks pale as a bone. The first time she read them she burst into a furious, ringing laugh, and crushing the letter into a ball, flung it into the waste-paper basket and went out. That was the afternoon on which she renewed her friendship with Everard Satchwell. But when she came home she sought the waste-paper basket, and taking out the letter, uncrumpled it and read it again. Thereafter she read it many times. Sometimes she went to bed with it crushed to her breast. But she never answered it. Instead, she wrote to Everard Satchwell and completed the work, already begun, of beguiling him back into her life just as he was beginning to hope he could do without her.

One day, when she was out riding with him, they met Harlenden riding alone. He had a moody, lonely look that wrenched at her heart for a moment until she saw the civilly indifferent smile with which he returned her half-appealing glance and Satchwell’s cheery greeting. As their eyes met, his were so empty of what she knew they could contain for her that her heart turned cold in her breast. For the first time, the well-bred impassivity of his face irked and infuriated her. She doubted, almost hated him. She could have struck him with her riding-whip because he gave no sign of the hurt she had dealt him, but, instead, her face grew almost as smilingly masklike as his own; only when she got home, within the refuge of her bedroom walls, did it change and become distorted with pain and rage, its beauty marred and blotted out with tears.

That he should ride coolly by and give no sign, while her heart ached as if a knife were in it, while she drained to the dregs the cup of lonely love! That was bitter. But bitterer still the knowledge that within herself lay the reason of their separation, as well as the power to end it. She could bring him back this very hour if she wished, was her thought. Yet, could she? Were not those other bonds that held her soul in slavery stronger than herself stronger (as he had suggested in his letter) than her love for Denis Harlenden?

Miserably, her face lifeless and pale as the face of one who has lain among the ashes of renouncement and repentance, she rose from the bed where she had flung herself weeping, and creeping to an old-fashioned oak bureau of heavy make, sat down before it and began to unlock its many drawers and take therefrom a number of little jewel-cases. One by one she opened these and spread before her the radiant, sparkling things they contained with their myriad points of light and dancing colour. She ran the things through her fingers and bathed her hands in them like water. Then she curved her palms into a cup and held them filled to the brim with such a sparkling draught as only a god could drink a draught with fire and ice in it, blood and crystal water, purity and evil. The roses of life and the blue flowers of death were all intermingled and reflected in that magic draught of frozen fire and liquid crystal. As the girl gazed into it, colour came back to her pale face, and her eyes caught and returned the flashing beams of light. It almost seemed as if she and the stones, able to communicate, were exchanging the signals of some secret code.

One jewel was more beautiful than all the rest, the lovely, flexible chain of stones she had been holding to her breast that night when Harlenden surprised her coming from the garden into the veranda the thing he had shaken from her hand into her lap as if it had been a toad. She remembered Harlenden, now, as she gazed into the iridescent shapes of light, seeming to see in their brilliant, shallow depths worlds of romance that every-day life knew not of. At last she caught the thing up and kissed it burningly, then pressed it against her heart as if it possessed some quality of spikenard to ease the pain she still felt aching there. The sound of the dinner-gong shook her from her strange dreams, and hastily, yet with a sort of lingering regret, she began to gather up the jewels and lay them once more into their downy nests of white velvet. Her fingers caressed and her eyes embraced every single stone as she laid it away.

“I must get some more,” she murmured feverishly to herself; “I must get some more soon!”

She had forgotten Denis Harlenden now. Her lips took on a hungry, arid line, and her eyes were suddenly hard and more brilliant than the stones she handled. The lust of diamonds, which is one of the greatest and most terrible of all the lusts, had got her in its scorpion-claws and was squeezing love from her heart and beauty from her soul.

“Rosanne, your sister is worse,” her mother said, at dinner. They had reached dessert, but these were the first words that had passed between them. Rosanne’s shoulders moved with the suggestion of a shrug.

“I think she gives way,” she remarked coldly. “She could shake off that illness with the exercise of a little self-control.”

“It is easy to talk like that when you are not the sufferer, dear. You forget that her whole heart is wrapped up in Dick. I believe that if he dies, she will .” The mother’s words ended in something very like a sob. She looked utterly worn out and wretched. Her eyes wistfully searched Rosanne’s, but the latter’s mood appeared to be one of complete sang-froid.

“You always look on the worst side of things, mother,” she said calmly. “If Dick dies, and I daresay he will cancer of the throat is nearly always fatal, I believe Rosalie will get over it in time and marry some other man.”

“Rosanne, I never thought you could be so heartless!”

“Nonsense, mother; it isn’t heartlessness but common sense, and I think you ought not to encourage Rosalie by being sympathetic. A little bracing brutality is what she needs to pull her out of her misery.”

Mrs. Ozanne rose, her eyes shining with anger as well as tears.

“I forbid you to speak to me of your unhappy sister unless you can speak kindly,” she said, and added harshly; “I sometimes think, Rosanne, that you are either not my child or that that Malay woman bewitched and cast some evil spell over you when you were a baby.”

Rosanne looked at her with musing eyes.

“I have sometimes thought so myself,” she said slowly, “and that, instead of you reproaching me, it is I who have the right to reproach you for bartering me away to witchcraft rather than letting me die an innocent little child.”

Sophia Ozanne’s lips fell apart, and the colour died slowly out of her handsome, wholesome-looking face. She said nothing while she stood there gazing for a long minute at her daughter; but her breath came laboriously, and she held her hand over her heart as if she had received a blow there. At last, in silence, she walked heavily from the room.

Rosanne helped herself daintily to fruit salad, but when she had it on her plate she did nothing but stare at it. After a few moments she rang the bell and sent out a message to the stables that she would require the carriage for an hour.

“And tell my mother, if she asks, that I have gone to Mrs. Drummund’s,” she directed old Maria, as she went away to her room to put on a hat and wrap.

“It is pretty awful at home now,” she complained to Kitty Drummund, some twenty minutes later. “The whole house is wrapped in gloom because Dick Gardner has a sore throat. One might as well live in a mausoleum.”

“Dearest, it is a little more than a sore throat, isn’t it? Len saw Tommy Gardner today, and he says Dick is in awful pain and can’t speak. They are sending him away to the Cape tonight, as a last hope. Doctor Raymond, there, is supposed to be wonderfully clever with affections of the throat, though I must say I don’t believe it will be much good, since Stratton has condemned him.”

“Oh, talk about something else, Kit, for heaven’s sake!” cried Rosanne, with a sudden access of desperate irritation. “I can’t bear any more Dick Gardner.”

Kitty stroked the hair and bare shoulders of the girl sitting on the floor beside her.

“I know you’re not really heartless, Nan, but you do sound so sometimes. I expect all this trouble at home is on your nerves a little bit. Tell me, how are your own affairs, darling? Is the engagement still going on?”

“No; the engagement is finished. I told you I never meant to marry him.”

“I think you are making an awful mistake, Nan. He’s the only man for you the only man who can ”

“Can what?” asked Rosanne, with fierce moodiness. “Save my soul alive?”

“How strange! Those were the very words I was going to use, though I don’t know why. They just came into my head.”

“Everyone seems to be hitting the right nail on the head tonight,” commented Rosanne dryly. “First, my mother; now, you. I wonder who’ll be the third. All good things run in threes, don’t they?”

Kitty knew better than to try to cope with her in that mood, so she remained silent until Rosanne rose and caught up her hat.

“Oh, don’t go yet, darling! Do stay and see Len. He had to go out directly after dinner, but he promised not to be long. Fancy! They’re having such excitement up at the compound. But I don’t know whether I ought to tell you, though,” she finished doubtfully.

“Oh, yes, do!” said Rosanne, wearily ironical. “Do tell me something that will make life seem less of an atrocious joke than it is especially if you oughtn’t to tell.”

“Well, we’re not supposed to breathe anything like this outside the compound walls, you know. Len told me not to mention it to a soul; but I don’t expect he meant to include you, for, of course, you are all right.”

“Of course!” Rosanne smiled mockingly at herself in the mirror before which she was arranging her hair preparatory to posing her hat upon it.

“Well, my dear, just think! They’ve discovered a Kafir boy in the compound who has been stealing thousands of pounds’ worth of diamonds for months, and passing them to someone outside. They caught him in the act this afternoon.”

“How frightfully exciting!” Rosanne had put her hat on now, but was still manoeuvring to get it at exactly the correct angle over her right eye. “How did he do it?”

“He made a little tunnel from under his sleeping-bunk to the outside of the compound wall, about a yard and a half long, and through that he would push a parcel of diamonds by means of a stick with a flat piece of tin at the end of it, something like a little rake and exactly the same length as the tunnel. He always pushed a little heap of earth through first, so as to cover the diamonds up from any eyes but those of his confederate outside. When the confederate had removed the diamonds, he pushed back the earth against the tin rake, which the boy always left in place until he had another packet of diamonds ready to put through. In this way the hole was never exposed, except during the few moments, once a week, when the boy was putting in a fresh packet.”

“But how awfully thrilling!” exclaimed Rosanne.

“Yes; isn’t it? What they want to do now is to catch the confederate who is, of course, the real culprit, for encouraging an ignorant Kafir to steal.”

“Who could it possibly be?”

“Goodness knows! Such heaps of people come inside this outer compound, tradespeople, servants with messages, and so on. But just think of it, Nan! Thousands of pounds’ worth, and the Kafir boy only got ten pounds for each packet he pushed through.”

“Well, what would a Kafir do with thousands of pounds, anyway?” said Rosanne, laughing irrelevantly. “I think ten pounds was quite enough.”

“That’s true too much for the wretch, indeed! However, he has confessed and told everything he could to help our people to trap the other wretch. Unfortunately, that is not very much.”

“No?”

“No; he says he has never seen the man who fetches the diamonds. The only one he has ever seen was a man he is not able to describe because he is so ordinary-looking, who came to his kraal in Basutoland about seven months ago, and made the whole plan with him to come and work on contracts of three months at a time as a compound-boy, steal as many diamonds as he could, and pass them out in the way I have described. Each parcel was to cost ten pounds and to contain no less than ten diamonds. No money passed between them, but every time a parcel was put through the tunnel, the confederate on the other side put a blue bead in its place among the sand. The boy found the bead and kept it as a receipt, and when he came out at the end of every three months’ contract he wore a bracelet of blue beads on his wrist. Naturally, the authorities didn’t take any notice of this when they searched him, for nearly all Kafirs wear beads of some kind. These beads were quite a common kind to look at; only when they were examined carefully were they found to have been passed through some chemical process which dyed the inside a peculiar mauve colour, making it impossible for the Kafir to cheat by adding ordinary blue beads (of which there are plenty for sale in the compound) to his little bunch of ‘receipts.’”

“How clever!” said Rosanne. “And how are they going to catch the confederate? Put a trap-parcel, I suppose, and pounce on him when he comes to fetch it?”

She had seated herself again, opposite Kitty, her arms resting on the back of the chair, her face vivid with interest.

“Cleverer than that,” announced Kitty. “They are going to put the trap and watch who fetches it. But they won’t pounce on him; they mean to follow him up and arrest the whole gang.”

“Gang?”

“Len says there’s sure to be a gang of them, and for the sake of getting them all, parcel after parcel of stones will be put through the tunnel, if necessary, until every one of them is traced and arrested.”

“Rather risky for the diamonds, I should think!”

“They’ll only put inferior ones in. Besides, the Kafir boy’s contract is up in a week’s time, and if all the gang aren’t caught by then, they’re going to let the boy go out and meet his confederate to deliver his beads, and then the arrest will be made.”

“Surely the Kafir was able to describe him, if he had been in the habit of meeting him every three months?”

“He says he was a young white boy, very thin, who wears a mask and an overcoat. They have met twice at night, in an old unused house in the Malay compound, the other side of Kimberley. Can you imagine any one running such awful risks for the sake of diamonds, Nan? But Len says it goes on all the time this illicit diamond-buying business and the company loses thousands of pounds every year and is hardly ever able to catch the thieves. They’re as clever as paint! They have to be, for if they are caught it means ten to twenty years’ imprisonment for them, as they know. Mustn’t it be awful to live in such a state of risk and uncertainty, never knowing when you’re going to be found out, for, of course, there are plenty of detectives on the watch for illicit buying all the time?”

“Awful yes, but terribly exciting,” Rosanne said musingly. “Don’t you think so?” she added quickly, and began to pull on her gloves.

“Ah, don’t go, yet!” cried Kitty. “Len will be dreadfully disappointed to find you gone.”

“Tell him you told me the story,” laughed Rosanne. “That will cheer him up.”

“I don’t think I shall,” said Kitty soberly. “I’m afraid he’d be awfully mad with me, after all, even though it is only you I’ve told. He’ll say women can’t keep things to themselves, and that you’re sure to tell someone else, and so the whole thing will get about.”

“You needn’t worry, dear. It will never get about through me,” said Rosanne quietly, and, kissing Kitty good-night, she went her ways.

As she passed through the brightly lit outer compound, stepping briskly toward the big gate, she was aware of more than one lurking shadow behind the blue-ground heaps. Also, it seemed to her that various guards were more alert than usual in their guardhouses. But she gave no faintest sign of observing these things, greeted the guard at the gate pleasantly, and, passing out to the street, stepped into the waiting carriage and was driven home. It wanted a few minutes to midnight when she stole from the veranda door of her room once more, dressed in her dim, straight gown of moonlight velvet with a swathe of colourless veil about her head and, sliding softly through the garden, went out into the quiet streets of the town until she came, at last, to a little indistinguished door next to a jeweller’s window, whereon was neatly inscribed the name, “Syke Ravenal.” On knocking gently three times, the door opened mechanically to admit her. Inside all was dark; but a few paces down a passage brought her to a door that opened into a small but brightly lighted room. An elderly man was seated at a table engaged in beautifully illuminating a parchment manuscript. This was Syke Ravenal.

“You are very late, my child,” he said, in a gently benevolent tone. His voice was rich and sonorous.

“It was not safe to come before.”

“Safe?” His dark, hawk-like face did not change, but there was a sound in his voice like the clank of broken iron.

“They’ve caught Hiangeli,” she said.

“Ah!” He carefully folded the manuscript between two protecting sheets of blotting-paper and placed it in the drawer of his table. His hands shook as if with ague, but his voice was as perfectly composed as his face when he spoke again.

“Tell me all about it, my child.”

“They got him in the compound today, as he was putting the parcel through. He has confessed as much as he knows about your son going to the kraal, and the blue beads, and the old house in the Malay compound where he was paid. They have now set a trap-parcel of stones and are sitting in wait to catch the confederate.” She sank down in a chair opposite to him and leaned her elbows on the table. “To catch me,” she said slowly.

He looked at her keenly. Her face was deadly pale, but there was no trace of fear in it. Whatever Rosanne Ozanne may have been, she was no coward. Neither was the man opposite her.

“Ah! They have no inkling, of course, that it was you who met Hiangeli and paid him?”

“No; he was not able to tell them any more than that it was a white boy.” She added, with the ghost of a smile, “A thin, white boy, in a mask and an overcoat.”

“Well, that’s all right. They won’t catch you, and they won’t catch me, and Saul is safe in Amsterdam. Luck is on our side, as she always is on the side of good players. Hiangeli must foot the bill, because he played badly.”

Rosanne sat listening. It was plain that Hiangeli’s fate was a matter of indifference to her, but some storm was brewing behind her smouldering eyes. Ravenal went on calmly:

“It’s been a good game while it lasted. The pity is that it must come to an end.”

Then the storm broke forth.

“But it must not come to an end!” she burst out violently. “I can’t live without it!”

The man looked at her reflectively.

“You’re a great sport. I’ve never known a woman with finer nerve. But, just the same, the game has got to come to an end.”

“Game! You don’t understand. It is meat and drink to me. I must have diamonds.” She sounded like a woman pleading for some drug to deaden pain, memory, and conscience. Her voice was wild; she put out her hands to him in an imploring gesture. “I have given up everything for them everything!”

He shook his head.

“We can’t do any more of it,” he said inflexibly. “Not for a year, at the outside.”

Her hands fell on the table. She shivered as though she already felt cold and hunger.

“Suffer torment for a year?” she muttered. “It is impossible. I can’t. I have nothing else. I’ve sacrificed everything to it duty, friendship, love!” She leaned her head in her hands, and Ravenal did not hear the last words.

“Pull yourself together, my child. It is not like you to give way like this. Listen: Go home now and sit tight. Nerve and a quiet going about your ways are what are needed for the next few weeks. Don’t come near me unless you have anything important to communicate; then come in the ordinary way to the shop with some jewel to be mended. But remember: There is no possible channel through which they can connect either of us with Hiangeli, and nothing in the world to fear.”

“It is not fear I feel,” she said dully.

“I know. It is disappointment. You are broken-hearted because the black diamonds cannot be handed over to you.”

She did not speak, but if ever a woman’s face betrayed hunger and passionate longing, hers did at that moment. All her beauty was gone. There was nothing but a livid mask with two burning eyes. A pitying look crossed Ravenal’s face. He was not an unkindly man.

“Poor child,” he said gently, “it’s hard on you!” For a moment he seemed to hesitate, then, coming to a swift decision, rose and went over to a safe embedded in the wall, and unnoticeable by reason of a piece of Oriental embroidery pinned above it and a chair standing carelessly before it. Unlocking it, he brought to the table a small jewel-case.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I can’t let you have it for good, because it’s not earned yet. Twenty more rough stones are wanted from you before this is yours. That was the bargain. But, considering all the circumstances, I’ll lend it to you for a while.”

Before he had finished speaking she had seized the case from his hands and pressed it open. A magnificent pendant gleamed up at her with all the smoky, mysterious beauty of black diamonds.

“I know I can trust you with it, for I have trusted you with more than that. My life is in your hands, just as much as yours is in mine. So keep the thing, and finish paying for it when you can. If we’re never able to get any more rough diamonds from the mine, you’ll have to pay in money.”

She hardly seemed to hear, so wrapped was she in the contemplation of her new treasure, brooding and crooning over it like a mother with a child. He watched her for a moment, then rose and fetched the grey veil she had cast off on entering.

“Come now, my child; it is late, and you must be gone. Be careful. I know I need not remind you of the oath between us three.”

“Silence and suicide, if necessary,” she murmured mechanically. She had taken the jewel from its case and was threading it on a chain round her throat, “Death rather than betray the other two.”

“That’s it,” said the other, with cheerful firmness. “Now, good-night.”

He lowered the lights and opened the door of the room. She passed into the dark passage, and he returned to the table and pressed a button which opened the front door. When he heard it softly close, he knew that she was out of the house and on her way home.

But her adventures were not yet over. Before she had gone very far she was aware of being followed. A mirror in a shop window reflected, afar off, the silhouette of the only other person besides herself in the now silent street a tall man in a slouch hat. Apparently he had on shoes as light as her own, for his feet made no more noise than hers, though her fine ear detected the steady beat of them behind her. For the first time, she knew terror. Supposing it were a detective who had tracked her from Syke Ravenal’s door, and was now waiting to arrest her as she entered her own home! She realized that her courage had lain in the knowledge of absolute security, for now, at the menace of discovery, her heart was paralyzed with fright and she could scarcely breathe. Instinct told her to run, but acquired self-control kept her from this madness, and, by a great effort, she continued walking quietly as before. Gradually her nerve returned. She determined, by feint, to discover whether the man were really following her or if his presence were due to accident. Having now arrived at the residential part of the town, where every house stood back from the road and was sheltered by a garden, she coolly opened a gate at random and walked boldly in. The man was still some way behind, and she had ample time to pass through the garden and reach the veranda before he drew near.

It was a house strange to her, and she had not the faintest idea who lived there. All the windows and doors were closed and shuttered, but light showed through a fanlight over the hall door. The veranda, blinded by heavy green mats, contained the usual array of chairs, and she sank down on one, her heart beating like a drum, her ears strained to hear her pursuer pass. Instead, to her horror, she heard the gate briskly unlatched and footsteps on the path. Terrified by this unexpected move, and sure, now, that the end had come, she sprang to her feet and stood waiting like a straight, grey ghost for the man to enter the veranda. The light above the hall door fell full on him, and it is hard to say whether dismay or horror were strongest in her when she recognized Harlenden.

“Denis!” she stammered.

“Why are you here, Rosanne?” he asked quietly. “Do you need me?”

Astonishment kept her dumb for a moment, then, with a realization of the position, came anger.

“How dare you follow me?” she exclaimed, in a low, tense voice.

“I live in this house.”

“You live here?” she faltered, and sat down suddenly, trembling from head to foot.

“Yes; and I have just returned from the club.”

“Then it was not you following me?”

At that she sprang up and threw herself into his arms in a frenzy of fear.

“Who was it, then? Oh, Denis, Denis, save me; take me into your house hide me!”

“Hush!” he said gently, and, keeping a supporting arm about her, guided her round the veranda, took a key out of his pocket, and let her and himself in by a side door. He closed and locked the door behind them, put her into a chair, then examined the window to make sure it was closed as well as shuttered. It was a man’s sitting-room, full of the scent of leather and tobacco. Going to a spirit-stand on the table he poured out some brandy.

“Drink this,” he said, in the same firm tone he had used all along, and mechanically she obeyed him.

“Where are we?” she murmured. “Whose house is this? I thought you lived at the club?”

“So I did until last week, when this house was lent me. Don’t be afraid. The servants are all in bed, and there is no one about. You are much safer here than roaming about the streets at one in the morning.”

“Then you were following me?”

“Certainly I was following you. I saw you come out of Syke Ravenal’s shop and I walked behind you, but only because your way and mine happened to be in the same direction.”

She passed her hand over her eyes with a hopeless gesture. It seemed as though this endless day of terrors and surprises would never be done, and she was weary, weary. He sat regarding her with grave eyes. She looked like a little, tired, unhappy child, and his heart was sick with longing to gather her in his arms and comfort her and take her sorrows on himself. But he knew that there were things beyond his help here, unless she gave him her full confidence and cast her burdens into his hands.

“Rosanne,” he said, at last, “I ask you to trust me.”

She looked at him with wretched eyes and a mouth tipped at the corners as though she would weep if she could. In truth, the enchantment of this man’s love and her love for him was on her again, and the poignant torment of it was almost too exquisite to bear. His voice stole through her senses like the music of an old dream. His lean, strong frame, the stone-grey eyes, and close-lipped mouth all spoke of that power in a man which means safety to the woman he loves. Safety! Only such a storm-petrel as Rosanne Ozanne, weary, with wings beaten and torn by winds whose fateful forces she herself did not understand, could realize the full allure of that word. She felt like a sailor drowning in a wild sea, within sight of the fair land he never would reach. That fair land of safety was not for her feet, that had wandered down such dark and shameful paths. But, oh, how the birds sang on that sweet shore! How cool were the green pastures! Small wonder that her face wore the tortured misery of a little child. Denis Harlenden’s heart turned to water at the sight of it, and the blood thrummed in his veins with the ache to crush her to his breast and keep her there against the world and against herself, spite of all the unfathomed things in her which estranged him. But he was strong enough to refrain from even touching her hands. Only his voice he could not stay from its caresses.

“Is not love enough for you, Rosanne?”

She trembled under it like leaves in the wind and lifted her eyes to his. They looked long into each other’s souls through those windows which can wear so many veils to hide the truth. But, in that moment, the veils were lifted, and both saw Truth in all her naked terror and beauty. What he saw scorched and repelled but did not daunt him; instead, a nobler love, chivalrous and pitiful, was born of the sight. And she saw that love, and knew it great enough to clothe her even if she came to him stripped of fair repute and the world’s honours.

“Yes; it is enough,” she said brokenly, and cast a thing she wore about her neck to the floor. Then, suddenly, she collapsed in her chair and fell into a fit of dry weeping. Long, bitter sobs shook her frame and seemed to tear their way out of her body. She was like a woman wrenched upon the rack. Harlenden could do nothing but stand and wait, his own face twisted with pain, until the storm was past. Gradually it died away, with longer and longer intervals between the shuddering sighs. At last, she uncovered her face, bleached and ravaged by the tearless storm, yet wearing a gentler beauty than ever it had known, and rose trembling to her feet.

“Take me home, Denis,” she whispered. He wrapped her veil about her and she felt the thrill of his hands upon her, but he did not kiss her. They had come closer to each other than any kiss could bring them. Just as they were passing from the room, she remembered something and stepped back.

“I must touch that vile thing again,” she said, “because it does not belong to me and must go back to where it came from.” She stooped and picked the black, glittering object from the floor.

A spasm contracted Harlenden’s face, but he asked no question. Silently they went from the house and into the dark streets. There was no moon. At her gate, he stooped and kissed her lips.

Mrs. Ozanne got up the morning of the following day with the urgent feeling on her of something to be done. It seemed as if there were some move to be made that would help her and her children in their unhappiness, only she didn’t know what the move was. But she always remembered, afterward, with what feverish urgency she dressed, putting on walking-things instead of a wrapper, and stepping from her room into the bustling atmosphere of the house with a determined indifference to the tasks and interests that usually occupied her attention.

Rosalie was as surprised to see her mother dressed for going out as was the mother to find her daughter at the breakfast-table.

“Why, Rosalie, my darling, this is an unexpected joy!”

“Yes, mother; I thought I would make an effort.”

It was the first time that the girl had been out of her room for over two weeks, and she looked frail as a snowdrop, and nearly as white.

“You can’t have two daughters sick abed, you know,” she added, with a wistful smile.

“Is Rosanne still ” Mrs. Ozanne often left questions and remarks about her other daughter unfinished.

The latter had spent the whole of the previous day in her room, seeming physically unable to leave her bed.

“Yes; I’m afraid she’s really ill. She just lies there, not speaking or eating, and she looks oh, mother, she looks so unhappy!”

“I begged her yesterday to see the doctor.”

“She says no doctor can do her any good, and that we must just leave her alone. I fancy she’s thinking out something that she’s terribly worried about.”

“There is something wrong,” said the mother heavily. “Oh, Rosalie, if she were only like you, and would not hide her heart from those who love her!”

“We can’t all be alike, mother darling! Rosanne has a stronger character for better or worse than I have. It is easy for me to throw my troubles on other people’s shoulders, but she is capable of bearing in silence far greater sorrows, and of making far greater sacrifices.”

“It is not a happy nature,” sighed her mother. “I wonder if Kitty Drummund can do any good if I send for her?”

“Better not, mother. She says she wants to see no one at present, and you know she was at Kitty’s the night before last.”

“I have asked her so often not to go out at night like that even to Kitty’s. I dare say she caught cold driving.”

“Poor Rosanne! It is more than a cold she has!”

Sophia Ozanne looked at her little, fair daughter with tender eyes, remembering the heartless way Rosanne had spoken of her sister’s grief only two nights before.

“How different you are, my Rosalie forgetting your own sorrow to think of others!”

The girl’s eyes filled with tears, but she did not shed them.

“I’m afraid it’s only another form of selfishness, mummie dear. I want to be kind and loving to all the world, just so that God will be good to me and give Dick another chance.”

“My poor, poor child!” The mother’s arms were round her in a moment, ready for comfort, but Rosalie pushed her gently away, smiling with quivering lips.

“Don’t pity me, mother. I’m determined to be brave, whatever comes. But tell me, where are you going, all prinked out in your walking-things?”

“I I don’t know yet, dear.” Mrs. Ozanne looked startled and embarrassed. “I have various things to do.”

“It’s a frightful morning. Do you think you ought to go out?”

“I must,” was the elder woman’s firm answer, and she bustled away before there was time for further questioning. Not for anything did she mean to be deterred from the pressing desire in her to go out. Rosalie had been perfectly right about the weather. It was that arid time of year when the air swirls in gusts of hot wind, laden with gritty blue sand from the debris-heaps, and the finer red dust of the streets. Kimberley dust is notoriously the worst of its kind in a land plagued with dust. Buluwayo runs it pretty close, and Johannesburg, in the spring months, has special sand-devils of its own, but nothing in Africa has ever quite come up to Kimberley at its worst. This was not one of its worst, however; merely a day on which all who had wisdom sat at home within closed doors and sealed windows, awaiting a cessation of the penetrating abomination of filth.

Often, during the morning, Mrs. Ozanne found herself wondering what she was doing wandering about the town on such a day. Desultorily, and with an odd feeling that this was not what she should be about, she let herself be blown along the street and in and out of shops, face bent down, eyes half closed, bumping blindly into people, her skirts swirling and flacking, her hat striving its utmost to escape and take the hair of her head with it. There were no necessary errands to do. The servants did the shopping, and she rarely went out except to drive in the afternoons. Vaguely she wondered why she had not used the carriage this morning.

Lunch-time came, but she could not bring herself to return home. It seemed to her that there was still something she must do, though she could not remember what.

In the end, she went into a clean, respectable little restaurant and lunched off a lamb chop and boiled potatoes, regardless of the excellent lunch that awaited her at home. Then, like a restless and unclean spirit, out she blew once more into the howling maelstrom of wind and dust.

She began to feel, at last, as if it were a nightmare, this necessity that urged her on, she knew not whither. Dimly, her eyes still blinded by dust, she was aware that she had left the main thoroughfares and was now in a poorer part of the town. With the gait of a sleep-walker, she continued on her way, until suddenly a voice addressing her jerked her broad-awake.

“You come see me, missis?”

A woman had opened the door of a mean tin house and stood there waiting in the doorway, almost as if she had been expecting Sophia Ozanne. The latter stood stone-still, but her mind went racing back to a winter afternoon seventeen years before, when she had sat in her bedroom with the little dying form of Rosanne upon her knees, and a voice speaking from the shadow of her bedroom had said, “Missis sell baby to me for a farthing; baby not die.” The same voice addressed her now, and the same woman stood in the doorway of the mean house gazing at her with large, mournful eyes. It was Rachel Bangat, the Malay cook.

“You come see me die, missis?” she questioned, in her soft, languorous voice.

“Die! Are you sick, Rachel?” said Mrs. Ozanne.

“Yes, missis; Rachel very sick. Going die in three days.”

Sophia Ozanne searched the dark, high-boned face with horror-stricken eyes, but could see no sign of death on it, or any great change after seventeen years, except a more unearthly mournfulness in the mysterious eyes.

But she had often heard it said that Malays possess a prophetic knowledge of the hour and place of their death, and she could well credit Rachel Bangat with this strange faculty.

“How my baby getting along, missis?”

Such yearning tenderness was in the question that Mrs. Ozanne, spite of a deep repugnance to discuss Rosanne with this woman, found herself answering:

“She is grown up now, Rachel.”

“She very pretty?”

“Yes.”

“And very rich?”

“We are well-off.”

“But she? I give her two good gifts that make her rich all by herself. She no use them?”

“What gifts were those, Rachel?” The mother drew nearer and peered with haggard eyes at the Malay.

“I tell you, missis. Because I love my baby so much and want her be very rich and happy, I give her two good things the gift of bright stones and the gift of hate well.”

Sophia Ozanne drew nearer still, staring like a fascinated rabbit into the mournfully sinister dark eyes, while the soft voice rippled on.

“She no use those gifts I give her? I think so. I think she say, ’I hate that man,’ and he die, sometimes quick, sometimes slow. Or she not hate too much, and he only get little sick. Or she wish him bad in his business, and he get bad. That not so?”

Sophia Ozanne thought of the black list she had kept for years of all the people whom Rosanne disliked and who had come to ill. In swift procession they passed through her mind, and Dick Gardner, with his anguished throat, walked at the end of the procession.

“Yes.” Her dry lips ejected the word in spite of her wish to be silent.

“Ah!” said the Malay, softly satisfied. “And the bright stones? She not get all she want without buy?”

This time, Mrs. Ozanne did not answer; only her blanched face grew a shade whiter. The woman leaned forward and spoke to her earnestly, imploringly.

“You tell her get rich quick with the bright stones before too late. Her power going soon. Rachel die in three days, and then gifts go away from Rachel’s baby. No more power hate or get bright stones. Tell her quick, missis. I make you come here today so you can go back tell her. All night and all morning I stand here make you come to me. Now, go back quick, tell my baby. Three days! Eight o’clock on third night, Rachel die.”

As strangely as she had appeared, the Malay withdrew into her wretched shanty and closed the door.

Sophia Ozanne never knew by what means and in what manner she reached her home that day, but at about five o’clock she came into the hall of Tiptree House, and was met by her daughter Rosalie with the news that Rosanne had got up from her bed and left the house, taking a suitcase with her.

“And, oh, mother, I could see that she was in a high fever, her cheeks were so flushed and her eyes like fire! What shall we do?”

Her mother sat down and wiped great beads of moisture from her pallid face.

“I think we will pray, Rosalie,” she said slowly.

It was still broad afternoon when Rosanne walked openly into Syke Ravenal’s shop, bag in hand. The benevolent-faced old man, occupied in cleaning the works of a watch, looked up with the bland inquiring glance of a tradesman to a customer. But his face changed when he saw her eyes.

“You have news?” he asked, in a low tone.

“Take me to the inner room,” she ordered curtly. Without demur, he led the way. The moment the door closed on them she flung the heavy leather bag on to the table.

“Take them,” she cried wildly; “take them back! They are all there. Not one is missing.”

“Hush, my child hush!” he gently urged. But she would not be hushed.

“I hate you,” she said passionately. “I curse the day I entered this shop, an innocent girl, and was beguiled by you and your son and my mad passion for diamonds into becoming your tool and accomplice. Oh, how I hate you! I can never betray you because of my oath, but I curse you both, and I pray I may never see or hear of you again.”

“That’s all right, my child,” he said soothingly. She threw him one glance of loathing and contempt and walked from the place.

Rosanne had taken to her bed again, and this time when they brought the doctor she was too ill to object, too ill to do anything but lie staring in a sort of mental and physical coma at the ceiling above her.

“Let her be,” said the old-fashioned family doctor, who had known her from babyhood. “She has a splendid constitution and will pull through. But let her have no worries of any kind.”

So they left her alone, except in the matter of ministering occasional nourishment, which she took with the mechanical obedience of a child.

For two days Rosanne lay there, silent and strange. The third day her sickness took an acute form. She tossed and moaned and called out in her pain, her face twisted with torture. Her mind appeared to remain clear.

“Mother, I believe I am dying,” she said, after one such spell, during the afternoon. “I feel as if something is tearing itself loose from my very being. Does it hurt like this when the soul is trying to escape from the body?”

“I have sent for the doctor again, darling.”

“It is nothing he can cure. It is here, and here that I suffer.” She touched her head and her heart. “But, oh, my body, too, is tortured!”

She lay still a little while, moaning softly to herself while her mother stood by, sick with distress; then she said:

“Send for Denis Harlenden, mother. I must see him before I die.”

Mrs. Ozanne asked no question. Her woman’s instinct told her much that Rosanne had left unsaid. Within half an hour, Harlenden was being shown into the drawing-room, where she awaited him. He came in with no sign upon his face of the anxiety in his heart. This was the fourth day since he had seen Rosanne, and she had sent him no word.

“Sir Denis, my daughter is very ill. I don’t know why she should be calling out for you ” She faltered. Marks of the last few days’ anxiety were writ large upon her, but she was not wanting in a certain patient dignity.

Harlenden strode over and took her hands in his as he would have taken the hands of his own mother.

“It is because we love each other,” he said gently, “and because, as soon as she will let me, I am going to marry her.”

A ray of thankfulness shone across her features.

“Marriage! I don’t know, Sir Denis; but, if you love her I can tell you something that will help you to understand her better, and perhaps you can help her.”

Briefly, and in broken words, she related to him the strange incident of Rosanne’s babyhood, its seeming effect upon her character, and the Malay’s extraordinary words of two days before. She did not disguise from him that she believed Rosanne guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously, of many dark things, but she pleaded for her child the certainty that she had been in the clutches of forces stronger than herself.

“About the diamonds,” she finished, at last, “I know nothing, and I am afraid to think. Did you read of that awful case of suicide in yesterday’s paper that man, Syke Ravenal, who has been robbing De Beers? I am tormented with the thought that she may have known something of him yet how could she?”

“You must put such a thought out of your mind for ever and never mention it to a soul,” said Harlenden firmly. “That man committed suicide because his only son had been killed by accident in Amsterdam. He left a vast fortune and a number of jewels which had been taken from their settings to De Beers, by way of conscience-money for several thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds in the rough which he had stolen from them. There is absolutely no evidence to connect any other person with his crime, except a letter asking the company to deal lightly with a native boy called Hiangeli, who had been a tool of his.”

“Then you think it could have nothing possibly to do with my poor child?”

“Certainly not,” said Denis Harlenden, without flinching.

“Not that I think that she would have done it in her right senses, but, oh, Sir Denis, she has been under a spell all her life, an evil spell, which, please God, will be broken when that woman dies! You do not think me mad, I hope?”

“I do not,” he answered gravely. “I am as sure of what you say as you yourself. What you do not know, Mrs. Ozanne, is that love has already broken that spell. Rosanne is already free from it.”

She looked at him questioningly, longingly.

“I cannot tell you more,” he said gently. “But, believe me, it is true. May I go to her now?”

The mother led the way. Rosanne, who had just passed through another terrible crisis of anguish, lay on her bed, still and white as a lily. A crimson-silk wrapper swathed about her shoulders, and the clouds of night-black hair, flung in a tangled mass above her pillows, threw into violent contrast the deadly pallor of her face. Her eyes, dark and wide with suffering, looked unseeingly at Harlenden at first, but gradually a ray of recognition dawned in them and she put out her hand with a faint cry.

“Denis!”

He took her hand and held it safe, while, with all the strength in him, he willed peace and calmness into her troubled mind.

“Denis, I think I am going to die.”

“Dearest, I know you are going to live for me.”

“No, no; I am not worthy of life or of you. I have been too wicked!”

“I want you to rest now,” he said.

“I cannot rest till I have told you everything. I wanted to tell you the other night, you know, but I was too exhausted. Denis, I am a criminal a thief! I have stolen diamonds under cover of the friendship of another woman. I have received them from another thief in the mines, and taken them to a man, whose son, a merchant in Amsterdam, sent me my share of the robbery in cut stones set as jewels. The rough stolen stones meant nothing to me, but the finished ones dazzled and maddened me. I cannot describe to you what they did to my senses, but I was mad at the sight and touch of them. They had power to benumb every decent feeling in me. For them, I forgot duty. My poor mother, how she has suffered! I betrayed friendship; I debased love! Yes, Denis, I debased our love! I meant just to take the joy of it for a little while, then cast it away when it came to choosing between you and the stones.”

“But you did not.”

“No, thank God, I could not! It was stronger than my base passion, stronger than myself. Oh, Denis, I thank you for your love! It has saved me from a hell in life, and a hell hereafter, for I think God will not further punish one so deeply repentant as I.”

“You are not going to die, Rosanne,” he repeated firmly.

“Do you think I would live and let you link your clean, upright life with my dark one?” she said sadly. “You do not even know all the darkness of it yet. Listen: I found I had a power through which I could hurt others by just wishing them ill and I used it freely. Ah, I have hurt many people! It tortures me to think of how many. I have been lying here for two days and nights trying to undo all the harm I have done, Denis willing against the evil I have wished for, praying for happiness to be given back to every one of them.” Her voice grew faint and far-off. “I have even tried to undo the harm I wished would come to the two people who tempted me into stealing, Denis. But, somehow, I feel that it is too late for them. That something in here” she touched her heart “which hurts me so much, tells me I cannot help those two wretched ones.”

Her voice broke off; she was shaken like a reed with a terrible spasm of suffering. It was as though she were in the clutches of some brutal giant.

“Denis,” she cried faintly, “I feel I am being rent asunder! Part of me is being torn away. Surely, even death cannot be so terrible!”

A clock on the table struck eight. Instantly she raised herself in bed, fell back again, gave a deep sigh, and lay still.

A few hours later, she woke with a gentle flush in her cheeks and a wonderful harmony in all her features. Her first glance fell upon her mother leaning over the foot of the bed, and she gave a happy smile.

“Oh, mother, I have had such a lovely dream! I dreamed Dick was well and coming back soon to Rosalie.”

“And so he is, my darling. She has had a wire to say that Doctor Raymond has discovered that the throat trouble is not malignant but quite curable. He will be well in a few weeks.”

“Then it may come true, my dream,” she said softly and shyly. “My dream that she and I were being married on the same day, she to Dick, and I to oh, Denis, how strange that you should be here when I was dreaming of you! What brought you here? Have you come to tell mother that we love each other?”

They began to realize dimly then, as they realized fully later on, that, by a merciful gift of Providence her mind was a blank concerning all the dark things of the past.

Memory of them had died with the dying of the Malay woman at eight o’clock on a summer evening, and no shadow of them ever came back to dim the harmony of her life with Denis Harlenden.

She is one of the happiest as well as one of the loveliest women in London today. Wrapped up in her home life and children, she still finds time to be seen about everywhere with her husband, and they are looked upon as one of the few ideally happy couples in society.

It has often been remarked, as a curious fact, that she never wears jewels of any kind, save an emerald ring and some exquisite pearls.