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 noodle. 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."
19
HYLAND
