The Missing Jewels

“It has a plan, but no plot. Life hath none”
—Festus

Anne Bardulph was not very youthful, nor was she particularly handsome; and she was housekeeper for the ailing Mrs. Dorman.

This invalid lady resided in a fine wooden house of many rooms through which ran a wide hall with walls of Pompeiian red, and a gilt-edged ceiling that was painted in some curious and uncertain tint of paly, pinkish brown. The floor was tessellated in brown and red, and the dark carved doors opened upon a columnar portico with broad brown steps leading down upon a great lawn flanked with thick trees of beech and pine.

Across the greening lawn in the sweet yellow April sunshine walked Anne Bardulph—a slim, straight woman with regular and severe features, and wonderfully large eyes of darkest gray. She had an abundance of neatly arranged dark hair, and she was neatly attired in a serviceable suit of some clinging, dull blue fabric, with collar and cuffs of linen—white, prim and immaculate.

Two young men coming upon the portico saw her—an interesting and not unlovely figure moving under the grim, whispering pines.

“The new housekeeper of madame pleases you—her you admire perhaps,” one remarked, rather quizzingly.

“Would you suggest that Miss Bardulph may not merit admiration?” returned the other, evasively and with some perceptible irritation.

“I now do nothing suggest,” was the protesting sharp foreign accent. “I here am come to see much, to much think; but I nothing say until the—how say you it?—till the one exposure grand.”

Tony Dorman smoked thoughtfully for several silent minutes. Finally he tossed away his cigar and turned toward his company.

“D’Razelly,” he began, pleasantly; “you are here ostensibly only as my guest and intimate friend—”

“On the what do you call, the ostensible,… Read More