MORBLEU! as I looked at them and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity--I wondered how I had come to resist the temptation.
While I gazed her hands began to waver.
'I cannot count,' she muttered helplessly.

'How many are there ?' 'In all, eighteen.' 'There should be eighteen,' she said.
She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real and that she was not dreaming.

Then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and I saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before.
'Well ?' she muttered between her teeth.
'Your price, man?
Your price ?' 'I am coming to it now, Mademoiselle,' I said gravely.

'It is a simple matter.

You remember the afternoon when I followed you--clumsily and thoughtlessly perhaps--through the wood to restore these things?
In seeming that happened about a month ago.