The Great Pearl Secret. C. N. Williamson

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      "His words were to that effect, Miladi, so far as I remember. But——"

      "Oh, then you were in the room? What fun! You can tell me if Juliet—if Mademoiselle replied that a spotted carpet might be good enough for a king; it wasn't good enough for a Phayre."

      Simone flung out her hands, palm upward. They were beautifully manicured hands, as carefully tended as her mistress's. And as she smiled her teeth showed very white. When her face was grave, she looked somewhat sullen, and might be thirty-five; but the smile was rejuvenating. It put her back to twenty-eight, and made her almost handsome as well as chic. "Miladi has known Mademoiselle since her schooldays, is it not?" she hedged. "Miladi will be able to judge as well as if I told her whether Mademoiselle would have made that answer."

      "I thought it rang true when I read it!" laughed Lady West. "But Simone, when you say I have 'known Mademoiselle since her schooldays', you make me sound awfully antique. We were at Madame de Sain's together. I came over to England the year I left, and married poor Sir Algy only three months after I was presented." She thought it best to hammer these details into Simone's head, in case the woman really was in touch with those back-door, kitchen-stairs reporters. Then, to give an air of carelessness to her words, she turned the subject. "Perhaps you might let Mademoiselle know I've come. Parker told me that she was lying down—that she'd promised her uncle to rest till tea time. So I wouldn't have her disturbed. But if her hair is being washed, she might let me in."

      "I will ask Miladi," said Simone. "I came to the salon to see if the curtains were drawn. If Madame permits!" She tripped with her short, high-heeled step first to one window, then the other, and closed the draperies of old-rose brocade. Having done this, she pattered out of the room.

      Emmy West's eyes followed the thin but graceful figure in black silk. "Simone is a character!" she thought. And she wondered what the maid's secret opinion was of this marriage which would take place next day; the richest American heiress with the poorest British duke!

      Left alone again, Emmy wriggled up from her nest of cushions, and beguiled the time in examining the wedding gifts once more. This did not take long, as the marriage had been suddenly hurried on by special license, and friends of Juliet Phayre and the Duke of Claremanagh had had only a few days to send in their offerings. Emmy had made this uninvited visit with the object of admiring a certain one of Juliet's presents, but she had already informed herself that it was not on show with the rest. Unless the bride-elect refused to see her, she did not intend to leave Harridge's without a glimpse—or anyhow, news—of it.

      When she had wandered languidly round the three or four tables on which jewel cases, gold, silver, china, and tortoise-shell things were spread, she propped her own black-edged card conspicuously in front of a Sevres-framed mirror, and bent down for a hasty peep at her face in its oval. She wondered if her hair were a tiny touch too red. She liked it, herself, and thought the heart-shaped white face, with its wide-apart black eyes set in that copper halo, a siren face. In the weeds of a war-widow it seemed to her that she was almost irresistible, but she could not help realizing that there were people who did resist her. The Duke was one. And an attractive cousin of Juliet's, John Manners, was another. She was vaguely aware that her own taste was decidedly vivid. Perhaps the hair was rather red! She had had it "bobbed" since Juliet came to London, because it worried her that Juliet should look years younger than she. No one would take Lady West for twenty-seven, but she had been an "old girl" and Juliet a "new girl," the year they met at school. Juliet was twenty-three now, and she, Emmy, had gone back to twenty-five. One had to be that, if one had married before the war!

      Quickly she dusted on a little powder from her vanity box, and accentuated the cupid's bow of her lips with a stick of red salve, for it was possible that Claremanagh might "breeze in." It would be like him! This thought was still in her mind when a door behind her opened. She turned nervously, tucking the lip-salve into her gold mesh bag, for just now the Duke was having a craze for baby complexions without make-up. But it was not the Duke. It was a girl, standing in the doorway between bedroom and salon.

      "Hello, Emmy!" she said.

      "Hello, Juliet!" said Emmy. And suddenly she felt years older than she had felt a moment ago. Juliet Phayre was such a big baby!

      The girl wore a pale pink chiffon thing which she probably considered a dressing gown. It was embroidered with wild roses and banded with swansdown, and no practical person would have dreamed of keeping it on for a shampoo. Juliet, however, thought herself sufficiently protected with a towel over her shoulders—a silvery damask towel under which her bare, girlish arms hung down. Over the towel streamed masses of hair in long, wet strands, which must be bright golden-brown when dry. These fell—weighted with water—nearly to her knees, and from their curly ends drops poured like unstrung pearls. She was so tall and slender, and brilliant rose-and-white, that she would have looked to a poet like Undine just out of her fountain.

      "You extravagant thing," Lady West scolded, "to spoil a lovely boudoir gown like that!"

      "Simone gets it to-morrow as a perquisite, with all my old things," Juliet dismissed the subject. "She said you'd been here an age, so I thought I'd better come in. I'll dry my hair before the fire, presently we'll have tea."

      So saying, she sat down tailor-fashion on a long, fat velvet cushion which lay in front of the low fender.

      "Evidently you're not expecting the Duke," laughed Lady West.

      "No-o," said the girl. "But I'm expecting a letter from him—or something."

      "You haven't got the pearls on show with your other presents, I see," remarked her friend. "I don't blame you! Of course, Parker is doing the watch-dog act outside; and only your bestest pals come up. Still, the pearls are frightfully valuable. And you can never tell! But do, do let me see them. I'm dying to!"

      "I haven't got them yet," Juliet confessed.

      "Not got them?" gasped the elder woman. "You're joking. Why"—and she laughed with great gaiety—"one marries Claremanagh for his pearls!"

      "Does one?" Juliet took her up. "I know whole populations of females who'd give their pearls to marry him, for—himself!"

      This told Emmy West that the bride-to-be knew she had been scratched, and was ready to scratch back. For an instant Emmy hesitated whether to be sweet or sharp, and decided to compromise. "By Jove, you are in love, aren't you?" she said.

      "I am," Juliet admitted. "I don't care a rap about being a duchess. That sort of thing seems—somehow old-fashioned since the war. And I don't think I ever was a snob, thank goodness."

      Emmy wondered if this were another "dig." She had been a Chicago girl, and only a "tuppenny half-penny" heiress, compared to Juliet Phayre; but she had wanted a title, and had paid all she could afford for a mere baronet, such as her few hundred thousand dollars would buy. On the sofa once more facing her low-seated hostess, she looked Juliet full in the eyes; but Juliet's were innocent, even dreamy. "I'd have snapped at my Boy if he'd been just a Tommy when I met him Over There, instead of a perfectly gorgeous Guardsman," the girl went on. "But, of course, I do want the pearls! I wouldn't be human if I didn't; everyone talks about them so much, even my Cousin Jack Manners, and says they're so marvellous. I expect they are what Pat is sending around this evening."

      "Sending around!" repeated the other. "You talk as if—as if they were a box of chocolates! Claremanagh is the careless-est creature on earth, I know. And he has been—er—very careless with the pearls. But I don't think even he would be as bad as that."

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