"Doubtless," she had replied, searching in her pocket for a scrap of anything that would serve.
"Will this do?" he then queried, bringing forth a coil of gold wire which he had been commissioned to buy for some fanciful work of his mother.
"Finely," she declared; "it is durable, it will give me a wide margin, it will be long in wearing out."
"Nay, then, you must have something more fragile," he had objected.
At that they both laughed, as he twisted a fragment of it on the little finger of her right hand. "There it is to stay," he asserted, "till your promise is redeemed." That was the last time he had seen her till to-day.
Now, sitting, thinking of the interview just passed, suddenly he remembered, as one often recalls the vision of something seemingly unnoticed at the time, that, upon her right hand, the little finger of the right hand, there was a delicate ring,--a mere thread,--in fact, a wire of gold; the very one himself had tied there two years ago.
In an instant, by one of those inexplicable connections of the brain or soul, he found himself living over an experience of his college youth.
He had been spending the day in Boston with a dear friend, some score of years his senior; a man of the rarest culture, and of a most sweet and gentle nature withal; and when evening came they had drifted naturally to the theatre,--the fool's paradise it may be sometimes, but to them on that occasion a real paradise.
He remembered well the play. It was Scott's _Bride of Lammermoor_. He had never read it, but, before the curtain rose, his friend had unfolded the story in so kind and skilful a manner as to have imbued him as fully with the spirit of the tale as though he had studied the book.
What he chiefly recalled in the play was the scene in which Ravenswood comes back to Emily long after they had been plighted,--long after he had supposed her faithless,--long after he had been tossed on a sea of troubles, touching the seeming decay in her affections. Just as she is about to be enveloped in the toils which were spread for her,--just as she is about to surrender herself to the hated nuptials, and submit to the embrace of one whom she loathed more than she dreaded death,--Ravenswood, the man whom Heaven had made for her, presents himself.