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At the clubs that night, and in many homes next day, it seemed that people had, simultaneously and without apparent new provocation, adopted Mr. Farnsworth’s view of the late excitement. Flaring up from the coals, the gossip about it began to burn with tenfold vigor. Some oracles went so far as to declare that Mrs. Ellison had recovered her jewel, had forgiven the thief (who had gone to reside on a ranch in New Mexico), and in token of gratitude for her signal mercy was about to present the Carcellini emerald to the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park. The hint given by the offending newspaper had not so far, prompted the general public to bring Tom Oliver’s name into the affair. He was too little known to the makers of paragraphs and the purveyors of contemporaneous news items to tempt the fate adumbrated for him by Ashton Carmichael to his sister. But any number of wild, vague, irrelevant stories were started, and left to drift down the tide of idle talk.

When Oliver, much disgusted on arrival in New York by the revelations of his brother-in-law, was about to set forth with that gentleman upon the disagreeable mission of stirring up the erring newspaper office with a very long pole, Mr. Farnsworth, in leaving his front door, was intercepted by a visitor—a young woman, closely veiled, and wet by a driving rain, holding an open umbrella in her hand.