The Coast of Chance | Page 2

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 course; I know," Flora murmured. A faint twitch of humor pulled her mouth, but the passionate romantic color was dying out of her face. How was it that one's romances could be so cruelly pulled down to earth? She ought to have learned by this time, she thought, never to fly her little flag of romance except to an empty horizon--never, at least, to fly it in Clara's face. It was always as promptly