“I leave behind the loveliest fallen angel you ever set eyes on.”
“You’ll find plenty more o’ that sort where you’re goin’.”
“Perhaps: but not one of ’em the prospective Mrs. T. Ah, well, all through life my hopes of domestic bliss have invariably been blighted; but the golden key of wealth will unlock the hardest woman’s heart. When I have leisure and freedom from worry, I’ll see what can be done. In the meanwhile, Jake, go and fetch some beer.” He took a shilling from his pocket, and gave it to the apprentice. “Make tracks,” he said, “or my sorrow will have fled before I’ve had time to drown it.”
Jake disappeared, as if shot from a cannon, and his master placed the roughly-formed ring on a steel mandril.
“But this,” said the goldsmith, tapping the ring skilfully with a diminutive hammer, “this is for the finger of an angel. Just think, Bill, what it would be to be spliced to a creature so good that it’d be like being chained to a scripture saint for the rest of your life.”
“I guess I’d be on the wallaby in a fortnight,” said the Prospector. “Personally, I prefer a flesh-and-blood angel, with a touch of the devil in her. But at best marriage is on’y a lottery. A wife’s like a claim—she may prove rich, or she may turn out to be a duffer.”
The goldsmith was now working upon the ring with a file. Next, he rubbed it with emery paper, and finished it with a burnisher.
“Yes,” said he, as he filled his pipe, and lighted it at the pilot-flame of the gas-jet which stretched its long, movable arm over the bench, “men, like flies, are of two kinds—those that fall into the soup, an’ those that don’t. I have borne a charmed life: you have fallen into the tureen. Here comes the beer!”
There was a scuffling on the side-path, and Jake’s voice was heard in shrill altercation. Up to that point, Benjamin’s body-guard had attended rigidly to its self-imposed duty, but now, following close on the heels of the apprentice, its members burst into the workshop.
Shaking with laughter, Tresco addressed the thirsty influx.