that an emerald which had been kept in safety for six hundred years among an intriguing and savage people, to whom it represented not only wealth but power, could be kept with equal safety for twenty-four hours in Chicago, where it had only an intrinsic value. I find I was mistaken; that I underrated and had formed a wholly false idea of your ability from my correspondence with you. Now that I have admitted that, does that satisfy you?"
"I do not understand," said Hereford honestly. His pulses were progressively quickening as he watched her here in these rooms of his, which never before had known a woman's presence. Why had she come? For the first time he noted in her eyes the same concentration of purpose he had seen so often in the eyes of Matthew Regan when
