The young wife repeated:  “I can never part with it.”

“But, my dear!” the wretched Berry wrung her hands, divided between compassion and a sense of injury.  “My dear!” she kept expostulating like a mute.

“I know all that you would say, Mrs. Berry.  I am very grieved to pain you.  It is mine now, and must be mine.  I cannot give it back.”

There she sat, suddenly developed to the most inflexible little heroine in the three Kingdoms.

From her first perception of the meaning of the young bride’s words, Mrs. Berry, a shrewd physiognomist, knew that her case was hopeless, unless she treated her as she herself had been treated, and seized the ring by force of arms; and that she had not heart for.

“What!” she gasped faintly, “one’s own lawful wedding-ring you wouldn’t give back to a body?”

“Because it is mine, Mrs. Berry.  It was yours, but it is mine now.  You shall have whatever you ask for but that.  Pray, forgive me!  It must be so.”

Mrs. Berry rocked on her chair, and sounded her hands together.  It amazed her that this soft little creature could be thus firm.  She tried argument.

“Don’t ye know, my dear, it’s the fatalest thing you’re inflictin’ upon me, reelly!  Don’t ye know that bein’ bereft of one’s own lawful wedding-ring’s the fatalest thing in life, and there’s no prosperity after it!  For what stands in place o’ that, when that’s gone, my dear?  And what could ye give me to compensate a body for the loss o’ that?  Don’t ye know—­Oh, deary me!” The little bride’s face was so set that poor Berry wailed off in despair.

“I know it,” said Lucy.  “I know it all.  I know what I do to you.  Dear, dear Mrs. Berry! forgive me!  If I parted with my ring I know it would be fatal.”

So this fair young freebooter took possession of her argument as well as her ring.

Berry racked her distracted wits for a further appeal.

“But, my child,” she counter-argued, “you don’t understand.  It ain’t as you think.  It ain’t a hurt to you now.  Not a bit, it ain’t.  It makes no difference now!  Any ring does while the wearer’s a maid.  And your Mr. Richard will find the very ring he intended for ye.  And, of course, that’s the one you’ll wear as his wife.  It’s all the same now, my dear.  It’s no shame to a maid.  Now do—­now do—­there’s a darlin’!”

Wheedling availed as little as argument.

“Mrs. Berry,” said Lucy, “you know what my—­he spoke:  ’With this ring I thee wed.’  It was with this ring.  Then how could it be with another?”

Berry was constrained despondently to acknowledge that was logic.

She hit upon an artful conjecture: 

“Won’t it be unlucky your wearin’ of the ring which served me so?  Think o’ that!”

“It may! it may! it may!” cried Lucy.

“And arn’t you rushin’ into it, my dear?”

“Mrs. Berry,” Lucy said again, “it was this ring.  It cannot—­it never can be another.  It was this.  What it brings me I must bear.  I shall wear it till I die!”