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 communicative, to multiply their luster, and to break more readily into the prismatic elements of color.

"More and more beautiful," Hampstead murmured, passing a hand across his brow.

"Sit down!" Marien breathed softly, motioning toward the Roman chair.

Hampstead was surprised to find how near the divan the inanimate chair appeared to have removed itself. Had he pushed it absently with his leg, as he made place for her, or had she, or had the thing itself—insensate wood and leather and plush—felt, too, the irresistible thrall of this magnetic, beauty-dowered creature who snuggled amid these silken panniers?

"I do not know diamonds very well," the minister confessed, sinking down into the chair.

"Look at them," Marien said, with a delightful note of intimacy in her voice, at the same time lowering her chin close, in order to survey the jewels as they lay upon her breast.

In John's eyes, this downcast glance gave Marien an expression that was Madonna-like and holy, and this again deepened his feeling of pity for her heartaches, and his anxiety to help her in what it was her whim to mask from him for the moment with all this childish play of interest in her jewels and in her own beauty. But it also disposed him to humor her the more, removing all sense of restraint when he followed the glance of her eye to where the more brilliant stones of the pendant lay in the snowy vale of her bosom, or when, leaning closer still, he could see that their intermittent flashing facets were responding to the pulsing of her heart.

"And what is the amber stone?" he asked innocently.

"Amber!" Marien laughed. "It is a canary diamond, the finest stone of all. It alone cost four thousand dollars."