Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/77

 time transfer all his risk and liability to someone else, and go back to his work with a light heart, and, in a certain sense, a clear conscience.

Yet there was one magnificent rose-diamond, which must have weighed somewhere between forty and fifty carats, which he would dearly have loved to see nicely cut and polished, and glittering on the neck or in the hair of a certain well-loved someone far away in old Carlisle; for he knew well enough that there was not another of its size and colour in the world. The nearest to it was in the De Beers collection, and the mere possession of it by anyone but a monarch or a millionaire would mean just what his own possession of it meant, so there was no use thinking about that.

With something very like a sigh for the unattainable possibilities of his so far successful theft, he tied up the gems in a bit of