Days, weeks, months had passed by, and Otto, a wanderer in a foreign land, had heard no tidings of his Aurelia.  Ye who have loved may well conceive how her ring was all in all to him.  He divided his time pretty equally between gazing into its cerulean depths, as though her lovely image were mirrored therein, and pressing its chilly surface to his lips, little as it recalled the warmth and balminess of hers.

The burnished glow of gold, the chaste sheen of silver, the dance and sparkle of light in multitudinous gems, arrested his attention as he one evening perambulated the streets of a great city.  He beheld a jeweller’s shop.  The grey-headed, spectacled lapidary sat at a bench within, sedulously polishing a streaked pebble by the light of a small lamp.  A sudden thought struck Otto; he entered the shop, and, presenting the ring to the jeweller, inquired in a tone of suppressed exultation: 

“What hold you for the worth of this inestimable ring?”

The jeweller, with no expression of surprise or curiosity, received the ring from Otto, held it to the light, glanced slightly at the stone, somewhat more carefully at the setting, laid the ring for a moment in a pair of light scales, and, handing it back to Otto, remarked with a tone and manner of the most entire indifference: 

“The worth of this inestimable ring is one shilling and sixpence.”

“Caitiff of a huckster!” exclaimed Otto, bringing down his fist on the bench with such vigour that the pebbles leaped up and fell rattling down:  “Sayest thou this of a gem framed by genii in the bowels of the earth?”

“Nay, friend,” returned the jeweller with the same imperturbable air, “that thy gem was framed of earth I in nowise question, seeing that it doth principally consist of sand.  But when thou speakest of genii and the bowels of the earth, thou wilt not, I hope, take it amiss if I crave better proof than thy word that the devil has taken to glass-making.  For glass, and nothing else, credit me, thy jewel is.”

“And the gold?” gasped Otto.

“There is just as much gold in thy ring as sufficeth to gild handsomely a like superficies of brass, which is not saying much.”

And, applying a sponge dipped in some liquid to a small part of the hoop, the jeweller disclosed the dull hue of the baser metal so evidently that Otto could hardly doubt longer.  He doubted no more when the lapidary laid his ring in the scales against another of the same size and make, and pointed to the inequality of the balance.

“Thou seest,” he continued, “that in our craft a very little gold goes a very great way.  It is far otherwise in the world, as thou, albeit in no sort eminent for sapience, hast doubtless ere this ascertained for thyself.  Thou art evidently a prodigious fool!”

This latter disparaging observation could be safely ventured upon, as Otto had rushed from the shop, speechless with rage.