with her portrait to Sir Nicolas Steele, fairly beat any tiling I'd ever heard of.
"Who is she?" I kept asking myself, "the Baroness de Moncy? I've heard the name somewhere. She isn't in Paris now, or I should have known of it. He must have met her at Trouville at a masked ball or something. He couldn't have known her, but she knew him—and here's the reminder. Did ever a man have such luck?"
With this in my head I went to his private drawer, where he'd put the locket away, and I had a good look at it. The thing weighed heavy enough to be gold twice over; but it was not until I had fingered it for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour that I found out how to open it. You did it by a press of your hand upon the top of the egg, and then it flew open sharp, like a matchbox. The portrait, which might have been called a miniature, I suppose, lay deep in the heart of it. It was the picture of a girl perhaps of twenty-six years of age, and I must say. that the prettiness of the thing fairly took my breath away. I'm not one to say much about the looks of Frenchwomen as a whole, but this creature was beautiful beyond compare. If I'd have hunted Paris for a month I could not have found her like—not one so elegant or with such hair tumbling about her shoulders as that picture gave her. And when I remembered that Mr. Ames had said she was worth three hundred thousand pounds, I could have cried at the luck that had come to us.
