CHAPTER XI


When the last of the guests had driven away, I went back into the inner
hall and found Samuel at the side-table, presiding over the brandy
and soda-water. My lady and Miss Rachel came out of the drawing-room,
followed by the two gentlemen. Mr. Godfrey had some brandy and
soda-water, Mr. Franklin took nothing. He sat down, looking dead tired;
the talking on this birthday occasion had, I suppose, been too much for
him.

My lady, turning round to wish them good-night, looked hard at the
wicked Colonel's legacy shining in her daughter's dress.

"Rachel," she asked, "where are you going to put your Diamond to-night?"

Miss Rachel was in high good spirits, just in that humour for talking
nonsense, and perversely persisting in it as if it was sense, which you
may sometimes have observed in young girls, when they are highly wrought
up, at the end of an exciting day. First, she declared she didn't know
where to put the Diamond. Then she said, "on her dressing-table, of
course, along with her other things." Then she remembered that the
Diamond might take to shining of itself, with its awful moony light
in the dark--and that would terrify her in the dead of night. Then she
bethought herself of an Indian cabinet which stood in her sitting-room;
and instantly made up her mind to put the Indian diamond in the Indian
cabinet, for the purpose of permitting two beautiful native productions
to admire each other. Having let her little flow of nonsense run on as
far as that point, her mother interposed and stopped her.