The Coast of Chance | Page 2

was the most
extraordinary thing! She was bewildered with the feeling that what was
blazing at her from the columns of the paper was at once the wildest
thing that could possibly have happened, and yet the one most to have
been expected.
For, from the first the business had been sinister, from as far back as
the tragedy--the end of poor young Chatworth and his wife--the Bessie,
who, before her English marriage, they had all known so well. Her
death, that had befallen in far Italian Alps, had made a sensation in their
little city, and the large announcements of auction that had followed
hard upon it had bred among the women who had known her a morbid
excitement, a feverish desire to buy, as if there might be some special
luck in them, the jewels of a woman who had so tragically died. They
had been ready to make a social affair of the private view held in the
"Maple Room" before the auction. And now the whole spectacular
business was capped by a sensation so dramatic as to strain credulity to
its limit. She could not believe it; yet here it was glaring at her from the
first page. Still--it might be an exaggeration, a mistake. She must go
back to the beginning and read it over slowly.
The striking of the hour hurried her. Shima's announcement of dinner
only sent her eyes faster down the page. But when, with a faint, smooth

rustle, Mrs. Britton came in, she let the paper fall. She always faced her
chaperon with a little nervousness, and with the same sense of
strangeness with which she so frequently regarded her house.
"It's fifteen minutes after eight," Mrs. Britton observed. "We would
better not wait any longer."
She took the place opposite Flora's at the round table. Flora sat down,
still holding the paper, flushed and bolt upright with her news.
"It's the most extraordinary thing!" she burst forth.
Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the
presence of the paper, and the suppressed excitement of her
companion's face--seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of
her light eyes, through all her smooth, pretty person, before she reached
for an explanation.
"What is the most extraordinary thing?" The query came bland and
smooth, as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.
"Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon it simply
vanished! And--and it was all our own crowd who were there!"
"Vanished!" Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard in the face of
this extraordinary statement. "Stolen, do you mean?" She made it
definite.
Flora flung out her hands.
"Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room, in the middle of the
afternoon, when everybody was there--and they haven't the faintest
clue."
"But how?" For a moment the preposterous fact left Clara too quick to
be calm.
Again Flora's eloquent hands. "That is it! It was in a case like all the
other jewels. Harry saw it"--she glanced at the paper--"as late as four

o'clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it
was gone."
Flora leaned forward on her elbows, chin in hands. No two could have
differed more than these two women in their blondness and their
prettiness and their wonder. For Clara was sharp and pale, with silvery
lights in eyes and hair, and confronted the facts with an alert and
calculating observation; but Flora was tawny, toned from brown to
ivory through all the gamut of gold--hair color of a panther's hide, eyes
dark hazel, glinting through dust-colored lashes, chin round like a fruit.
The pressure of her fingers accented the slight uptilt of her brows to
elfishness, and her look was introspective. She might, instead of
wondering on the outside, have been the very center of the mystery
itself, toying with unthinkable possibilities of revelation. She looked far
over the head of Clara Britton's annoyance that there should be no clue.
"Why, don't you see," she pointed out, "that is just the fun of it? It
might be anybody. It might be you, or me, or Ella Buller. Though I
would much prefer to think it was some one we didn't know so
well--some one strange and fascinating, who will presently go slipping
out the Golden Gate in a little junk boat, so that no one need be
embarrassed."
Clara looked back with extraordinary intentness.
"Oh, it's not possible the thing is stolen. There's some mistake! And if it
were"--her eyes seemed to open a little wider to take in this
possibility--"they will have detectives all around the water front by
to-night. Any one would find it difficult to get away," she pointed out.
"You see, the ring is an important piece of property."
"Of