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and he would certainly have felt its loss at once had it not been for Hester’s eruption on their halcyon hour. She still thought of him as she went upstairs to dress, remembering that Clive had laughed when she called him a bad man, and taking comfort from the remembrance. Clive had said that he understood her kindness; but that had been a concession to their need of unity. He did not understand it; and he would never like Captain Ingpen. But Clive had not repudiated him, and she must find what comfort she could in that fact, for though she had said in her anger that he should not proscribe her friendships, it had been of Hester, not of Clive, that she had been thinking; she knew that she would find little savour in a friendship repudiated by Clive. The lamp and candles were waiting for her in her room and she took off the ring and laid it with her own rings on the dressing-table while she washed and changed. And, while she sat between her candles, dressing her hair, she glanced at it once or twice, lying there in the little tumbled heap of pearls and diamonds. It looked old, a mourning-ring perhaps, that had, perhaps, belonged to some ancestor; a sorrowful ring somehow; but then Captain Ingpen was a sorrowful man. That was one reason why she liked him; he understood sorrow.