elf to
her at an awkward moment. She laughed, in short, while her face was
still in the basin, with the very proper result that she had to grope
for the towel with her eyes shut.

It was still a cold, damp face (Grizel was always in such a hurry)
when she opened her most precious drawer and took from it a certain
glove which was wrapped in silk paper, but was not perhaps quite so
conceited as it had been, for, alas and alack! it was now used as a
wrapper itself. The ring was inside it. If Grizel wanted to be
engaged, absolutely and at once, all she had to do was to slip that
ring upon her finger.

It had been hers for a week or more. Tommy had bought it in a certain
Scottish town whose merchant princes are so many, and have risen
splendidly from such small beginnings, that after you have been there
a short time you beg to be introduced to someone who has not got on.
When you look at them they slap their trouser pockets. When they look
at you they are wondering if you know how much they are worth. Tommy,
one day, roaming their streets (in which he was worth incredibly
little), and thinking sadly of what could never be, saw the modest
little garnet ring in a jeweller's window, and attached to it was a
pathetic story. No other person could have seen the story, but it was
as plain to him as though it had been beautifully written on the tag
of paper which really contained the price. With his hand on the door
he paused, overcome by that horror of entering shops without a lady to
do the talking, which all men of genius feel (it is the one sure
test), hurried away, came back, went to and fro shyly, until he saw
that he was yielding once more to the indecision he thought he had so
completely mastered, whereupon he entered bravely (though it was one
of those detestable doors that ring a bell as they open), and sternly
ordered the jeweller, who could have bought and sold our Tommy with
one slap on the trouser leg, to hand the ring over to him.

He had no intention of giving it to Grizel. That, indeed, was part of
its great tragedy, for this is the story Tommy read into the ring:
There was once a sorrowful man of twenty-three, and forty, and sixty.
Ah, how gray the beard has grown as we speak! How thin the locks! But
still we know him for the same by that garnet ring. Since it became
his no other eye has seen it, and yet it is her engagement ring. Never
can he give it to her, but must always carry it about with him as the
piteo