desired to make some substantial present to the girl he had just married; and he enclosed a rough sketch of a necklace which he thought would be a pretty thing if rare stones were used to decorate it. I fell in with his whim at once; and as it chanced that I had just received from the Jägersfontein mine a parcel of twenty very fine greenish diamonds, I determined to use them in the business. I may say that these stones were of a delicious pale green tint, almost the color of the great jewel in the vaults at Dresden, and that their fire was amazing. I have known a gem of the hue to be worth nearly a hundred pounds a carat; and as the lot I had averaged two carats apiece, their worth was very considerable. I had not learnt what were Brewer's instructions in the matter of expense; but I wrote to him by the next post congratulating him on his marriage and informing him that I would set the green diamonds in a necklace, and sell them for two thousand pounds. He accepted the offer by a cablegram, and on the following day sent a long letter of instruction, the pith of which was the[ 36] order to engrave on the inner side of the pendant the words, major lex amor est nobis. I laughed at his Latin, and the amatory exuberance which it betrayed; but fell upon the work, and finished it in the course of three weeks, during which time I had many and irritating requests from him for constant and detailed accounts of its progress. [ 36] When the trinket reached him, his satisfaction was quite childish. He wrote of his delight, and of "Eugy's," and spoilt three sheets of good note-paper telling me of her appearance at the English ball early in June; and of the sensation such an extraordinary bauble caused. Then I heard from him no more until August, when I read in an evening paper that he had been returning from Veulettes after a short holiday, and had been in a great train smash near Rouen. A later telegram gave a list of the dead, in which was the name of his wife; and three days after I received from him the most pitiful letter that it has ever been my misfortune to read. The whole wounded soul of the man seemed laid bare upon the paper; the simplicity of his words was so touching and so expressive of his agony, that I could scarce trust myself to go through the long pages over which he let his sorrow flow. Yet one paragraph remained long in my mind, for it was one that recalled the necklace of green diamonds, and it was so astonishing that I did not doubt that Brewer was, for the time at any rate, on the high-road to madness. "I have put them round her dear neck," he said, "and they shall cling always to her in her long sleep."[ 37]
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