“Your ring!” I said.
I took it off and handed it to him.
It flashed its green and blue and orange sparks in the sunlight as it lay in his palm. He looked at it, hard. No harder than I did. I was looking my good-bye to something that had meant so little—and so much. Too much. I didn’t know how I was going to bear another second of this; and then, quickly, he closed his brown hand over his diamonds and dropped them into his jacket-pocket. Gone.
Then, looking eastward over the bridge, he said, “We’d a discussion about this before.”
“Had we?” I said.
I wondered what had become of my pride, so frantically was I hoping that this might lead to another “discussion” now. Anything to keep him for another few minutes.... That gesticulating trèfle-scented French beauty would have him for the rest of her life; she might spare him to me for just one more squabble!
“Yes: don’t you remember how you informed me you’d send the ring back at the year’s end? I said then——But look here!” he broke off, “isn’t there anywhere near here where we could get some lunch while we settle about this?”
Ah! Then I should have my few minutes longer!
There’s a little creamery in the King’s Road where he and I lunched together again: this time off rolls and butter and boiled eggs. There he began again. “An engaged girl who had been really engaged,” he said, “would insist upon sending back the ring as a matter of course; but why in this case?”
And so on.