She sat up quickened with humiliation. The thing was not a tragedy, it was a grotesque. Blushing more and more crimson, struggling with strange mingled crying and laughter, she slipped out of the bed, and, still in her nightgown, ran down the hall, and knocked on Mrs. Herrick's door, until the dismayed lady opened it.
"I thought it was he," Flora gasped. "I thought it was he who had taken the ring! Why didn't he tell me? Why did he keep it secret? I would have done anything to have saved it for him, and I let Harry get it! Oh, isn't it cruel? Isn't it pitiful? Isn't it ridiculous?"
Mrs. Herrick, who, for the last thirty-six hours, had so departed from her curriculum of safety, and courageously met many strange appearances, now was to hear stranger facts. For Flora had let go completely, and Mrs. Herrick, without hinting at hysterics, let her laugh, let her cry, let her tell piece by piece, as she could, the story of the two men, from the night when Kerr had spoken so strangely at the club on the virtues of thieves to the moment when, in the willow walk, they discovered that the jewel was gone. Clara's part in the affair, and the price she had exacted, even in this unnerved moment, Flora's instinct withheld, to save Mrs. Herrick the last cruelest touch. But for the rest--she let Mrs. Herrick have it all--and under the shadow of the grim facts the two women clung together, as if to make sure of their own identities.
"I don't even know who he is," Flora said faintly.
Mrs. Herrick gave her a quick glance. She had not a moment's hesitation as to whom the "he" meant. "You will have to ask him when he comes."
"But think of what I have done. I have lost him the sapphire, and he loves it--loves it as much as he does me."
Again the glance. "Did he tell you that?"
Flora nodded. The other seemed intently to consider. "He will come back," she declared.
Upheld by her friend's assurance, Flora found the endurance necessary to spend the day, an empty, stagnant day, in moving about a house and garden where a few hours ago had passed such a storm of events. She reviewed them, lived them over again, but without taking account of them. Her mind, that had worked so sharply, was now in abeyance. She lived in emotion, but with a tantalizing sense of something unexplained which her understanding had not the power to reach out to and grasp. For a day more she existed under the same roof with Clara, for Clara stayed on.