'Will you open this?' I said. 'I believe that it contains what
your brother lost. That it contains all I will not answer,
Mademoiselle, because I spilled the stones on the floor of my
room, and I may have failed to find some. But the others can be
recovered; I know where they are.'
She took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers
shaking. A few turns and the mild lustre of the stones shone
out, making a kind of moonlight in her hands--such a shimmering
glory of imprisoned light as has ruined many a woman and robbed
many a man of his honour. MORBLEU! as I looked at them and as
she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity--I
wondered how I had come to resist the temptation.
While I gazed her hands began to waver.
'I cannot count,' she muttered helplessly. 'How many are there?'
'In all, eighteen.'
'There should be eighteen,' she said.
She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and
did so twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real
and that she was not dreaming. Then she turned to me with sudden
fierceness, and I saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the
greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before.
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