This was the history of the ring, and here, as well as elsewhere, we may tell Ethelyn’s history up to the time when, on her bridal day, she sat with Aunt Barbara at the breakfast table, idly playing with her spoon and occasionally sipping the fragrant coffee.  The child of Aunt Barbara’s half-sister, she inherited none of the so-called Bigelow estate which had come to the two daughters, Aunt Barbara and Aunt Sophia, from their mother’s family.  But the Bigelow blood of which Aunt Sophy Van Buren was so proud was in her veins, and so to this aunt she was an object of interest, and even value, though not enough so to warrant that lady in taking her for her own when, eighteen years before our story opens, her mother, Mrs. Julia Bigelow Grant, had died.  This task devolved on Aunt Barbara, whose great motherly heart opened at once to the little orphan who had never felt a mother’s loss, so faithful and true had Aunt Barbara been to her trust.  Partly because she did not wish to seem more selfish than her sister, and partly because she really liked the bright, handsome child who made Aunt Barbara’s home so cheery, Mrs. Dr. Van Buren of Boston, insisted upon superintending the little Ethelyn’s education, and so, when only twelve years of age, Ethelyn was taken from the old brick house under the elms, which Mrs. Dr. Van Buren of Boston despised as the “district school where Tom, Dick, and Harry congregated,” and transplanted to the highly select and very expensive school taught by Madame—­, in plain sight of Beacon Street and Boston Common.  And so, as Ethelyn increased in stature, she grew also in wisdom and knowledge, both of books and manners, and the style of the great world around her.  Mrs. Dr. Van Buren’s house was the resort both of the fashionable and literary people, with a sprinkling of the religious, for the great lady affected everything which could effect her interest.  Naturally generous, her name was conspicuous on all subscription lists and charitable associations, while the lady herself owned a pew in——­ Church, where she was a regular attendant, together with her only son, Frank, who was taught to kneel and respond in the right places and bow in the creed, and then, after church, required to give a synopsis of the sermon, by way of proving that his mind had not been running off after the dancing school he attended during the week, under his mother’s watchful supervision.  Mrs. Van Buren meant to be a model mother, and bring up her boy as a model man, and so she gave him every possible advantage of books and teachers, while far in the future floated the possibility that she might some day reign at the White House, not as the President’s wife—­this could not be, she knew, for the man who had made her Mrs. Dr. Van Buren of Boston slept in the shadow of a very tall monument out at Mount Auburn, and the turf was growing fresh and green over his head.  So if she went to Washington, as she fondly hoped she might, it would be as the President’s mother; but when