“Because you’re married.”
“Exactly. Isn’t it—devilish?”
“Not at all. It’s strictly correct. She said herself that your wife was the proper person to have the ring now.”
He looked at me with a bitter smile.
“My dear Jason,” he said, “I have been flattering your acumen at the expense of your morality. I thought you knew what this meant.”
“No more than what the princess told me.”
“No, of course not, or you would not have brought it. When we parted, I gave her the ring, and she made me promise, on my honor as a gentleman, to come to her the moment she sent the ring—to leave everything and come to her, and take her away. And I promised.”
“And she has never sent till now?”
“I never married till now,” he said bitterly. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Nothing that I know of.”