Next morning Jack Manners was hideously jerked from sleep before eight by the jangle of a telephone bell close to his bed. In self-defence he reached out and grabbed the receiver, in haste to stop the din.

"Hello!" his voice said: but his tone said "Damn!" And he was astounded when Juliet answered. Juliet! \'phoning at this hour! Juliet, who had been at the opera last night, as he happened to know, and who had always loved her beauty sleep, as a young bird loves its nest!

"I\'m sorry to disturb you, Jack," she was saying. "I suppose you were fast asleep, and you\'ll wish you hadn\'t told me you were going to stop at the Tarascon. But I can\'t help it! Do you mind getting up and dressing in a hurry, and letting me come round to see you?"

"Shan\'t I call at your house instead?" Jack suggested, wide awake now.

"No, I must come to you. Have you a private sitting room?"

"I haven\'t."

"Then take one at once, and be ready to receive me in it. Will half an hour be too soon for you?"

"Not a bit," Jack assured her. He spoke with the warmth of affection, and felt it. But that was all he felt. The reaction he\'d been expecting yesterday hadn\'t come yet!

He \'phoned downstairs that he wanted a private sitting room, and breakfast for two, with flowers on the table, in half an hour. Then he plunged into his bath, and as he shaved and dressed with the haste that knows how not to waste a single step or gesture (this was characteristic of him) he wondered, as he had wondered yesterday, about himself and Juliet.

Funny, how he had dreaded meeting her married, for fear the boiling lava should break through the cooled crust! And the lava hadn\'t broken through. He couldn\'t even feel it boil. Juliet had her old sweetness, and charm—even more. She was prettier than ever, too.

He still loved her, of course, only the love didn\'t hurt like a wound with someone twisting a knife in it, as it had hurt when she told him she was engaged, and on the day of her wedding. There was just a gentle, rather interesting pain, like the pain of remembering a beautiful dream which had broken off in the midst; and it was no sharper this morning than when she came to tea with him yesterday.

Just to test himself he had gone to the opera, and stood up (because there wasn\'t a seat to be had) in order to have Juliet burst upon him in all her glory, wearing the pearls, and, perhaps, beaming with recovered happiness at Claremanagh\'s side. Well, she had come late into her box, and made a sensation. Everyone had stared at her—and the pearls—through levelled glasses. She had been just as glorious as he\'d expected, though she hadn\'t exactly beamed. And he—Jack—had not turned a hair! He hardly knew whether to attribute this to his superhuman self-control, or the strong moral barrier set up between his thoughts and his love by her marriage.

Anyhow, there it was! He was enduring no Calvary, and his heart played none of the tricks it would have played once at being awakened by Juliet\'s voice, with the request for a meeting alone with him. All he felt was sympathetic interest, and a fear that the girl was coming to say she\'d made a hash of things, in spite of his advice.

In precisely twenty-five minutes after the first call of the telephone bell in his ear, he was dressed, and criticising the arrangement of La France roses on the table in his new sitting room. Sharp on the half hour, again came the jangling call.

"Lady for you, sir. Says she\'s your cousin, and it\'s not necessary to give her name. You\'re expecting her."

"Quite right," Manners answered. "Send her up at once. I\'ll meet her at the lift." Which he did, and got rather a shock at seeing Juliet all in black—even a black veil.

"I don\'t think I ever saw you dressed like that before," he began, leading her to the sitting room. "I thought you always hated black clothes."

"So I did. So I do. That\'s the reason I\'m wearing them to-day," the girl almost breathlessly explained. "I suppose you\'ll think it\'s melodramatic of me, and maybe it is, though I don\'t feel so. I wanted to put on mourning."

"Good heavens! What for?"

"My happiness."

If she had been less beautiful, that announcement certainly would have sounded a melodramatic note—or else it would have been funny. But she was so white, so big eyed, so like a broken lily in her black draperies, that Jack\'s heart yearned over her. She leaned to him wistfully, as they stood just inside the closed door, her hands in his; and the man knew suddenly that it would be perfectly safe and good for him to take her in his arms. He held them out, having dropped her hands, and the girl flung herself on his breast as she used to do when she was ten, if a finger had been cut or a knee bruised. The next moment she was crying on his shoulder as though her heart would break, her slim young body an incarnate sob as it heaved and shook in his clasp.

"Oh, Jack, you\'re the only one I have in the world now!" she gasped.

"Nonsense, nonsense, child. You\'ve got Claremanagh. You\'ll always have him," he soothed her. "This is some passing trouble. It will blow over. Tell me all about it. But no, first you must have breakfast. You haven\'t had bite or sup, I\'ll bet!"

History repeated itself. Again his handkerchief was out. He wiped her eyes with it. He mopped them. How long and dark her lashes were, wet and clinging together! He bent over her, and kissed her forehead. It was hot, and she smelled like a ripe, delicious peach. But his pulses hardly tingled. He was too sorry for her, however, to analyze his own feelings much, or even think of himself, although after years the Adored One—married, and belonging to another man—was in his arms!

Of course she hadn\'t had breakfast, she said. She didn\'t want breakfast. The very idea of it made her sick. She had been awake all night, and had been dressed—without a maid to help her—since seven. She was just one bunch of raw, aching nerves! But somehow Jack was able to soothe her a little, as Pat, at his best, could never have done, because she loved him too wildly. Jack got her to the sofa, her back to the door, so that the waiter bustling in with breakfast should not see the tear-stained face. Soon there were cushions behind her shoulders; the blinds were pulled half down; there was a cool, dewy rose in her hand. Then, when the waiter had gone, she was sipping hot coffee with cream in it and (on one knee beside the sofa) Jack was feeding her with bits of toasted and buttered roll. In spite of herself, Juliet felt better. She didn\'t want to feel better, but she did! And she had drunk nearly a cupful of coffee before Jack let her begin to talk.

Having begun, however, she told him everything. It all came out with a rush, and Jack listened in silence. Not once did he interrupt, and, fast as she spoke (she could not control her speech to slowness), she thought that he was judging, classifying each incident, considering how one bore upon another.

He did not give away his own secret of yesterday: that he had seen Lyda Pavoya go into the house, and that he had known she must be hidden somewhere in the room while he and Defasquelle were in Claremanagh\'s study. There was nothing to be gained by telling the poor girl that. She might even be aggravated, by the additional proof against Pavoya, into accusing the woman as a thief! And the more he thought, the more inclined he was to advise against an open scandal.

"So you see why I wanted to put on mourning for my dead happiness," Juliet finished. "You said this was a \'passing trouble.\' But you can\'t say that now, can you?"

"Yes. I can and do," Jack maintained stoutly, for her sake wholly, not for Claremanagh\'s. He began to believe, in his heart, that this generous, loving girl had been badly "let down," between the Duke and the Polish dancer. Nevertheless, it was still only fair to give "Pat" (as Juliet called him) the benefit of the doubt, just as he had urged yesterday. "You say yourself that, judging from his manner when the box was opened, and when you spoke about the clasp, Claremanagh was as surprised as you were at the false pearls being there."

"Yes. Of course I don\'t accuse him of \'stealing\' the real ones himself, as he so cruelly pretended I did. But he must have had this copy made for Pavoya. Probably she thought at first that she had the true pearls, and when she found out how she\'d been tricked, she made up her mind to turn the tables on Pat. Or else she saw a way to humble me—his wife. Yes, that must be it! I\'m glad—glad I wore the horrid imitation rope last night. I hardly knew why I did it, unless it was for a kind of bluff. But I see now, it was more like inspiration. If I choose to stick to it that I have the real pearls, she can\'t get much fun out of wearing them, can she? People will believe me, instead of her, if it comes to open defiance."

"It won\'t come to that, from Pavoya, and it oughtn\'t from you, I think," said Jack. "My theory is rather different from yours."

"What is it, for heaven\'s sake?"

"It\'s rather scrappy as yet. But so far, I should think Pavoya might have been working in a much more subtle way than you suppose. I knew that once, long ago, and again later, there was a plot to steal the pearls. Apparently bot............