after Gaston was gone he did not speak for a long time, but sat on the
divan, apparently absorbed in his thoughts.

Restless, Diana moved about the tent, listlessly examining objects that
she knew by heart, and flirting over the pages of the French magazines
she had read a dozen times. Usually she was thankful for his silent
moods. To-night with a woman's perversity she wanted him to speak. She
was unstrung, and the utter silence oppressed her. She glanced over her
shoulder at him once or twice, but his back looked unapproachable. Yet
when he called her, with a swift revulsion of feeling, she wished he
had kept silent. She went to him slowly. She was too unnerved to-night
to struggle against him. What would be the use? she thought wearily; it
would only end in defeat as it always did. He pulled her down on the
divan beside him, and before she realised what he was doing slipped a
long jade necklace over her head. For a moment she looked stupidly at
the wonderful thing, almost unique in the purity of its colour and the
marvellous carving on the uniform square pieces of which it was
composed, and then with a low cry she tore it off and flung it on the
ground.

"How dare you?" she gasped.

"You don't like it?" he asked in his low, unruffled voice, his eyebrows
raised in real or assumed surprise. "Yet it matches your dress," and
lightly his long fingers touched the folds of green silk swathed across
the youthful curve of her breast. He glanced at an open box filled with
shimmering stones on a low stool beside him.

"Pearls are too cold and diamonds too banal for you," he said slowly.
"You should wear nothing but jade. It is the colour of the evening sky