“Oh, thank you!  Bless you!  Yes, this minute!”

The artful rogue did not go; never intended.

He rose to go; but had a sudden inspiration; very sudden, of course. 
“Had he nothing about him you could recognize him by?”

“Yes, he had a ring I gave him.”

Falcon took a black-edged envelope out of his pocket.

“A ruby ring,” said she, beginning to tremble at his quiet action.

“Is that it?” and he handed her a ruby ring.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Mrs. Staines uttered a sharp cry and seized the ring.  Her eyes dilated over it, and she began to tremble in every limb; and at last she sank slowly back, and her head fell on one side like a broken lily.  The sudden sight of the ring overpowered her almost to fainting.

Falcon rose to call for assistance; but she made him a feeble motion not to do so.

She got the better of her faintness, and then she fell to kissing the ring, in an agony of love, and wept over it, and still held it, and gazed at it through her blinding tears.

Falcon eyed her uneasily.

But he soon found he had nothing to fear.  For a long time she seemed scarcely aware of his presence; and when she noticed him, it was to thank him, almost passionately.

“It was my Christie you were so good to:  may Heaven bless you for it:  and you will bring me his letter, will you not?”

“Of course I will.”

“Oh, do not go yet.  It is all so strange:  so sad.  I seem to have lost my poor Christie again, since he did not die at sea.  But no, I am ungrateful to God, and ungrateful to the kind friend that nursed him to the last.  Ah, I envy you that.  Tell me all.  Never mind my crying.  I have seen the time I could not cry.  It was worse then than now.  I shall always cry when I speak of him, ay, to my dying day.  Tell me, tell me all.”

Her passion frightened the egotist, but did not turn him.  He had gone too far.  He told her that, after raising all their hopes, Dr. Staines had suddenly changed for the worse, and sunk rapidly; that his last words had been about her, and he had said, “My poor Rosa, who will protect her?” That, to comfort him, he had said he would protect her.  Then the dying man had managed to write a line or two, and to address it.  Almost his last words had been, “Be a father to my child.”

“That is strange.”

“You have no child?  Then it must have been you he meant.  He spoke of you as a child more than once.”

“Mr. Falcon, I have a child; but born since I lost my poor child’s father.”

“Then I think he knew it.  They say that dying men can see all over the world:  and I remember, when he said it, his eyes seemed fixed very strangely, as if on something distant.  Oh, how wonderful all this is.  May I see his child, to whom I promised”—­

The artist in lies left his sentence half completed.