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been? For a moment she saw, clearly and horribly, that he did not know what to do; that she baffled him. And she went on, marvelling at her own resource, ‘It doesn’t look like a man’s ring, somehow; it looks like a great-grandmother’s ring.’ She stood with her back to the mantelpiece facing him, her hands locked behind her.

Ingpen now looked down at the ring and turned it on his finger and smiled, still very easily. ‘You are not far wrong,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a man’s ring and it belonged to a great-aunt, a racy old lady, very much of a figure in my boyhood.—My mother was brought up by her and she was fond of me. She left me the ring when she died. Harriet Beaton was her name.’

Monica met his eye; his eye with its straight upper lid cutting across the pupil; his eye so candid and so calculating, and as she met it she remembered that he had spent his life dealing with warrior-tribes. Calculating candour had been his frequent weapon. And suddenly she was sick at heart—seeing the tidal wave glide forward, and a trail of fiery mockery sped through her as she thought: ‘Ah, my friend, you are as swift, as adroit as I am;—but your memory has played you false. You should have looked, again, at your ring before