"You are right," agreed the L.C.P. "There's nothing else in the window to touch that."
"Let's go in and buy it, then," I said. "I have a friend to whom I should like to make a little present."
"Little present!" echoed Menela. "It will cost you three thousand gulden at the least."
"That is not too costly, considering everything," said I, mysteriously. And I was bubbling with malicious joy, as, by right of purchase, the ring became mine. "Each one of them considers it as good as hers," I said to myself. "To-morrow evening, at Rotterdam, if I am safely spared from Freule Menela, and she is gone out of my life forever, that ring may change hands; but it won't go to The Hague."
I dreamed all night that I was pursued by Robert's escaped fiancée, and dodging her, ran into the arms of Sir Alec MacNairne, who denounced me fiercely as a murderer. Nor was there much relief in awaking; for I knew that in her room, divided from me only by a friendly wall or two, Freule Menela lay planning how to trap me.
"If I am to be saved," I said to myself, "I'm afraid it won't be by my own courage or resource. I must look to my aunt. She fought for me nobly all day; but there are still twelve hours of danger. With her and Menela it's a case of Greek meeting Greek. Will she be clever enough to pull me through?"
XXXII
I knew I looked haggard, and hoped I looked interesting, when I appeared in the big hall of the hotel after breakfast in the morning, ten minutes before the time at which we were to start for Rotterdam.