Those words were uttered with the last breath he let me draw for some time. But oh, Padre, if it had been my last on earth, how well worth while it would have been to live just till that minute, and no longer! I am so happy! I don't know how I am going to deserve this forgiveness, this deliverance, this joy!
"Even if I'd found a strange girl looking after my parents and saving their lives and winning their love, it would have been pretty difficult to chuck her," Jim was laughing. "You, on this side of the door, waiting to face the ogre Me, couldn't have felt much worse than I felt on my side, not knowing what I should see—or do. Darling, one more kiss for my people's sake, one more for myself, and then I must take you to them. It's not fair to keep them waiting any longer. But no—first I must put a ring on the Girl's finger—as I hoped to do long ago. You remember—the ring of my bet, that almost made me lose you? I told you about it, didn't I, on our day together, when I thought I should come back in two weeks?"
"You told me you hoped not to lose a thing you wanted. You didn't say it was a ring. But at Royalieu—the newspaper correspondents' château near Compiègne—we came across a friend of yours, the one you made the bet with——"
"Jack Curtis!"
"Yes. He told me about the ring. And he was sure you were alive."
"Good old Jack! Well, now I'm going to slip that magic ring on your darling finger—the 'engaged' finger."
"But where is it?"
"The finger? Just now on the back of my neck, which it's making throb—like a star!... Oh, the ring? That's in the hobby-horse which I see over there, as large as life. At least, it's in him unless, unlike a leopard, he's changed his spots."
Jim wouldn't let me go, but drew me with him, our arms interlaced, to the tower end of the room where the hobby-horse he had once rescued from fire endlessly pranced. "This used to be my bank, when I was a little chap," he said. "Like a magpie, I always hid the things I valued most in a hole I made under the third smudge to the left, on Spot Cash's breast. 'Spot Cash' is the old boy's name, you know! When I won the bet and took the ring home, I had a fancy to keep it in this hidie hole, for luck, till I could find the Girl. Mother knew. She was with me at the time. But I was half ashamed of myself for my childishness, and asked her not to tell—not even the Governor. I shouldn't wonder if that was why it occurred to her to pack up my treasures for France. Maybe she had a prophetic soul, and thought, if I found the Girl, I should want to lay my hand on the ring. Here it is, safe and sound."
As he spoke, he had somehow contrived to extract a particularly black smudge from the region of the hobby-horse's heart. It came out with a block of wood underneath, and left a gap which gave Spot Cash the effect of having suffered an operation. At the back of the cavity a second hole, leading downward, had been burrowed in the softish wood; and in this reposed a screwed-up wad of tissue paper. Jim hooked the tiny packet out with a finger, opened the paper as casually as though it enclosed a pebble, and brought to the light (which found and flashed to the depths of a large blue diamond) a quaintly fashioned ring of greenish gold.