Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/72

64 'Is impossible to you? Then don't!' said Mrs. Guy with decision.

'Ah, but if they're real I can't keep them!' Charlotte, with her eyes on them, moaned in her impatience. 'It's too difficult.'

'Where's the difficulty, if he has such sentiments that he would rather sacrifice the necklace than admit it, with the presumption it carries with it, to be genuine? You've only to be silent.'

'And keep it? How can I ever wear it?'

'You'd have to hide it, like your aunt?' Mrs. Guy was amused. 'You can easily sell it.'

Her companion walked round her for a look at the affair from behind. The clasp was certainly, doubtless intentionally, misleading, but everything else was indeed lovely. 'Well, I must think. Why didn't she sell them?' Charlotte broke out in her trouble.

Mrs. Guy had an instant answer. 'Doesn't that prove what they secretly recalled to her? You've only to be silent!' she ardently repeated.

'I must think—I must think!'

Mrs. Guy stood with her hands attached but motionless.

'Then you want them back?'

As if with the dread of touching them Charlotte retreated to the door. 'I'll tell you to-night.'

'But may I wear them?'

'Meanwhile?'

'This evening—at dinner.'

It was the sharp, selfish pressure of this that really, on the spot, determined the girl; but for the moment, before closing the door on the question, she only said: 'As you like!'

They were busy much of the day with preparation and rehearsal, and at dinner, that evening, the concourse of guests was such that a place among them for Miss Prime failed to find itself marked. At the time the company rose she was