‘Oh no, that’s all right.’

‘You looked so solemn when first I saw you.’

‘Did I?’

‘And then you just jumped.’

‘Did I?  I’m sorry.’

‘Why?’

’I don’t know.  I like our feelings to be our very very own, and never to show them to any one else at all.  I dare say it is absurd, but that is my instinct.’

’Never mind, dear, it wasn’t such a big jump as all that.  Where are we going?’

‘Come here, Maude, into the waiting-room.’

She followed him into the gloomy, smoky, dingy room.  Bare yellow benches framed an empty square of brown linoleum.  A labouring man with his wife and a child sat waiting with the stolid patience of the poor in one corner.  They were starting on some Saturday afternoon excursion, and had mistimed their train.  Maude Selby and Frank Crosse took the other corner.  He drew a jeweller’s box from his pocket and removed the lid.  Something sparkled among the wadding.

‘O Frank!  Is that really it?’

‘Do you like it?’

‘What a broad one it is!  Mother’s is quite thin.’

‘They wear thin in time.’

‘It is beautiful.  Shall I try it on?’

‘No, don’t.  There is some superstition about it.’

‘But suppose it won’t fit?’

‘That is quite safe.  I measured it with your sapphire ring.’

’I haven’t half scolded you enough about that sapphire ring.  How could you go and give twenty-two guineas for a ring?—­oh yes, sir, that was the price, for I saw a duplicate yesterday in the Goldsmith’s Company.  You dear extravagant old boy!’

‘I had saved the money.’

‘But not for that!’

’For nothing half or quarter as important.  But I had the other to the same size, so it is sure to fit.’

Maude had pushed up her veil, and sat with the little golden circlet in her hand, looking down at it, while the dim watery London sunlight poured through the window, and tagged all her wandering curls with a coppery gleam.  It was a face beautiful in itself, but more beautiful for its expression—­sensitive, refined, womanly, full of innocent archness and girlish mischief, but with a depth of expression in the eyes, and a tender delicacy about the mouth, which spoke of a great spirit with all its capacities for suffering and devotion within.  The gross admirer of merely physical charms might have passed her over unnoticed.  So might the man who is attracted only by outward and obvious signs of character.  But to the man who could see, to the man whose own soul had enough of spirituality to respond to hers, and whose eye could appreciate the subtlety of a beauty which is of the mind as well as of the body, there was not in all wide London upon that midsummer day a sweeter girl than Maude Selby, as she sat in her grey merino dress with the London sun tagging her brown curls with that coppery glimmer.

She handed back the ring, and a graver expression passed over her mobile face.