n's face and wondered. There was more than one
emotion shown--fierce resentment at first, then the half fear of the
hound or the hound-bitch yielding to the master, and then the yielding
of the heart, not touched, perhaps, for a quarter of a century.
Harlson talked. The woman did not speak for minutes, then made some
short reply, and then, a little later, there were tears in her old foxy
eyes.

He rose, glared at the one or two hard-faced waiters who had ventured
near him, and took upon a card something she said. Then he came back
to me as the old woman left the place.

"Queer-looking, wasn't she?" he said.

"Decidedly," said I. "What were you talking about?"

"Oh, nothing but the ring. It's wonderful how they always wear the
ring when they have the right to."

"But what was the use of it all? What came of your talk?"

"Nothing to speak of. It was only a fad of mine. I have a right to an
occasional whim, haven't I? I'll be hanged if I'll see a wedding ring
worn that way buried in unbought ground. The old hag was a marvel of
all that is unwomanly and sinful. But that ring shall be properly
buried, and the hand that wears it, because it _does_ wear it. So I'm
going to take the woman out of this and put her where she will not have
to be a monster in order to live."

And he did what he said he would do. He found a place in some old
women's home for that aged demon, and one day he made me go with him to
see her. Maybe it was the different dress and the different
surroundings, but, it seemed to me, her eyes were not as they were in
the low restaurant. The hand that wore the thin gold ring was clean in
its pitiful shrunkenness. The creature looked neither hunted nor
hunting. She was but an old woman going to the grave so near her, and
going, I could not but imagine, to find the one who had given her that
gold circlet some half century ago. I rather fancied Harlson's fad.
As for him, when I told him so, he only said:

"Oh, of course. Peter told the third assistant bookkeeper to credit
Harlson with such or such an amount." And he added; "If those people
don't take good care of that old woman there'll be a new
superintendent." But they took good care of her.

This is lugging in an incident at great length as an illustration, but
I know of no other way to explain how Harlson so expressed himself when
I asked him how he knew whether the woman of whom he had been talking
was married or not. He felt c