The Coast of Chance

She read the details with interest down to the end, where the name of the “famous Chatsworth ring” finished the announcement with a flourish. Why “famous”? It was very provoking to add an advertisement with that vague adjective and not explain it.

She turned indifferently to the first page. She read a sentence, re-read it, and reread it. Then, her eyes galloped down the column as if she could not read fast enough. The colour came into her cheeks. The grasp of her hands on the edges of the paper tightened. It was the most extraordinary thing! She was bewildered with the feeling that what was blazing at her from the columns of the paper was the wildest thing that could have happened and yet the one most to have been expected.

From the first, the business had been sinister, from as far back as the tragedy—the end of poor young Chatsworth and his wife—the Bessie, who, before her English marriage, they had all known so well. Her death, which had occurred in far Italian Alps, had made a sensation in their little city. The significant announcements of the auction that had followed hard upon it had bred among the women who had known her a morbid excitement, a feverish desire to buy, as if there might be some extraordinary luck in them, the jewels of a woman who had so tragically died. They had been ready to make a social affair of the private view held in the “Maple Room” before the auction. And now the spectacular business was capped by a dramatic sensation to strain credulity to its limit. She could not believe it, yet it glared at her from the first page. Still, it might be an exaggeration or a mistake. She must go back to the beginning and read it over slowly.

The striking of the hour hurried her. Shima’s announcement of dinner only sent her eyes faster down the page. But when Mrs. Britton came in with a faint, smooth rustle, she let the paper fall. She always faced her chaperon with a bit of nervousness and the same sense of strangeness she so frequently regarded her house.

“It’s fifteen minutes after eight,” Mrs. Britton observed. “We would better not wait any longer.”

She took the place opposite Flora’s at the round table. Flora sat down, still holding the paper, flushed and bolt upright with her news.

“It’s the most extraordinary thing!” she burst forth.

Mrs. Britton paused mildly with a radish in her fingers. She took in the presence of the paper and the suppressed excitement of her companion’s face—seemed to absorb them through the large pupils of her light eyes, through all her smooth, pretty person, before she reached for an explanation.

“What is the most extraordinary thing?” The query came bland and smooth, as if, whatever it was, it could not surprise her.

“Why, the Chatworth ring! At the private view this afternoon, it simply vanished! And—and it was all our crowd who were there!”

“Vanished!” Clara Britton leaned forward, peering hard at this extraordinary statement. “Stolen, do you mean?” She made it definite.

Flora flung out her hands.

“Well, it disappeared in the Maple Room in the middle of the afternoon when everybody was there—and they haven’t the faintest clue.”

“But how?” For a moment, the incredible fact left Clara too quick to be calm.

Again, Flora’s eloquent hands. “That is it! It was in a case like all the other jewels. Harry saw it”—she glanced at the paper—”as late as four o’clock. When he came back with Judge Buller, half an hour after, it was gone.”