"What do you think he wants?" she gently asked. It was as if she would coax it out of him. His answer was correspondingly low and soft.
She heard her secret fear spoken aloud with such assurance that she waited, certain at the next moment Harry's voice would people the silence with all the facts that had so far escaped her. But when, after a moment of looking before him he did speak, he went back to the beginning, which they both knew.
"You know he didn't want to part with it in the first place."
"Well," he answered quickly, "but that was before--" He caught himself and went on with a scarcely perceptible break: "He may have had a better offer for it since."
He couldn't have put it more mildly, and yet that temperate phrase brought back to her in a flash a windy night full of raucous voices and the great figures in the paper that had covered half a page--the reward for the Crew Idol. Could it be that--that sum so overwhelming to human caution and human decency which Harry had cloaked by his grudging phrase "some better offer"? What else could he mean? And what else could the blue-eyed Chinaman mean by his strange pursuit of her?
"Some one must have wanted it awfully," Flora tried again, keeping step with his mild admission.
Harry covered her with an impressive stare. "There's something queer about that ring," he nodded to her. He was going to tell her at last! She gazed at him in expectation, but presently she realized that nothing more was coming. He had stopped at the beginning. She tried to urge him on.
"Queer, what do you mean?" She was feigning surprise.
He looked at her cautiously. "Why, you must have noticed it yourself when we were at the shop. And now, to-night, his having followed you."
She could see him hesitate, choosing his words. She knew well enough her own fear of saying too much--but, what was Harry afraid of? Did he suspect her feeling for Kerr? Was that why he was holding back, leaving out, giving her the small, expurgated version of what he knew. She tried again, making it plainer.
"You think the ring is something he ought not to have had; something that belongs somewhere else?"
He looked away from her, around the room, as if to pick up his answer from some of the corners. "Well, anyway, it's lucky we waited about that setting," he said with quick irrelevance. "If you're going to be annoyed in this way you'd better let me have it."