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‘I hope I am not being tiresome, coming so early,’ he said, and he looked exceedingly affable and easy, yet, her perception sharpened to a razor edge, she imagined that he was watching her as she watched him. ‘I’ve lost a ring, an old ring I’ve worn for years. It occurred to me that it might have slipped off in the fountain yesterday. May I go and have a look?’

Still smiling and still silent, Monica went to the mantelpiece and took the ring from a little porcelain box that stood there. She held it out to him on the palm of her hand: ‘I thought it might be yours,’ she said.

Ingpen as he came forward was looking not at the ring, but at her. Did she still only imagine that he sounded her dexterity and her disingenuousness?

‘Was it in the fountain?’ he asked.—‘Thanks, most awfully.’ He slipped it on his finger, not taking his eyes from hers.

‘No; on the ground, and found by the merest chance. I was walking in the dark and the moon-light struck it. It was half buried already. It’s quite possible that by daylight you would not have seen it at all. You might have trodden it under foot and it would have been lost for ever.’

Was he not wishing, with all his heart, that it had