"Oh, not for that," she cried sharply. "Not for the sapphire!"
He stared. She had startled him clean out of his brooding. "In Heaven's name, for what, then?"
Oh, she could never tell him it was for him! In her distress and embarrassment she looked all ways.
His quick white finger touched her on the wrist. "For Cressy?"
The abrupt stern note of his question startled her. She held herself stiff and still for a moment, then: "For every one in this wretched business. I have to."
"Ah," he sighed out the satisfaction of his long uncertainty, "then Cressy _is_ in it."
"No, I didn't mean that--you mustn't think it--I can't discuss him with you!" She was hot to recapture her fugitive admission.
"Don't let that disturb you. You haven't given him away to me. I had all I'm likely to get from the man himself."
"He told me nothing. Don't you know that he misdoubts me? I got it out of him, by sleight of hand--where we had met before. Has he never told you anything of that morning when we left your house together?"
"Never." The admission cost her an effort.
He mused at her. "As I said, he told _me_ nothing, but it occurred to me when he came in that we might be there on the same errand."
"I mean I thought it might be safer all around that you should not see him that morning; so I got him away. He hasn't asked you for it since?"
"The sapphire?" she faltered. "No!" The more her instinct warned that it had been the jewel Harry had returned for, the more she repudiated the idea to Kerr.
"Why should you think he came for that? What has he to do with it?" she murmured.
"My God! how you do champion him!" He leaned forward sharply across the table. "What is this man to you?"
He was going too far. He had no right to that question. "The man I have promised to marry." Her hot look, her cold manner defied him to command her here. Yet for a moment, leaning forward with his clenched hands on the table, he looked ready to spring up and force her words back on her. The next he let it go and dropped back in his chair again.
"Quite so," he said. "But I didn't believe it." He stared at her with a dull, profound resentment. "Yet it's most possible; since it isn't the sapphire it would be that." He mused. "But, you extraordinary woman, why on earth--" he broke off, still looking at her, looking with a persistent, sharp, studying eye, as if she were the most puzzling and, it came to her gradually, the most dubious thing on earth. He was verily a magician, a worker of black magic; for under the spell of his eyes she felt herself turning into something horrible. However innocent she was in intention, the ugly appearance was covering her.