Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/70

62 'Because of the rest of the lot? Then your cousin's an ass. But what—if, as I understood you, he gave them to you—has he to do with it?'

'Why, if he gave them to me as worthless and they turn out precious'

'You must give them back? I don't see that—if he was such a fool. He took the risk.'

Charlotte fed, in fancy, on the pearls, which, decidedly, were exquisite, but which at the present moment somehow presented themselves much more as Mrs. Guy's than either as Arthur's or as her own. 'Yes—he did take it; even after I had distinctly hinted to him that they looked to me different from the other pieces.'

'Well, then!' said Mrs. Guy with something more than triumph—with a positive odd relief.

But it had the effect of making our young woman think with more intensity. 'Ah, you see he thought they couldn't be different, because—so peculiarly—they shouldn't be.'

'Shouldn't? I don't understand.'

'Why, how would she have got them?'—so Charlotte candidly put it.

'She? Who?' There was a capacity in Mrs. Guy's tone for a sinking of persons—!

'Why, the person I told you of: his stepmother, my uncle's wife—among whose poor old things, extraordinarily thrust away and out of sight, he happened to find them.

Mrs. Guy came a step nearer to the effaced Miss Bradshaw. 'Do you mean she may have stolen them?'

'No. But she had been an actress.'

'Oh, well then,' cried Mrs. Guy, 'wouldn't that be just how?'

'Yes, except that she wasn't at all a brilliant one, nor in receipt of large pay.' The girl even threw off a nervous joke. 'I'm afraid she couldn't have been our Rowena.'

Mrs. Guy took it up. 'Was she very ugly?'