“It is for you to wear,” she said, “only when you feel you want some extra help to enable you to bear up, as you do to-day. Let us call it the ring of fortitude, and every time you look down and see it, or feel it on your finger, you will remember what it means and why it is there, and that will give you courage. Why, you are much braver already.”
And it is true that Priscilla was. She almost skipped along beside her mother, and all that day she fondled the ring and forgot all about her tooth and the dentist, even about the perfectly hateful buzzing thing that he drills holes with.
She had a good night, and went off to him in the morning almost smiling, and whether it was that the ring helped her not to feel, or whether the dentist really did not hurt, I don’t know, but it is certain that she had almost a pleasant sitting in his detestable chair.
In addition to the ring of fortitude, Priscilla had been given a shilling to buy some cakes for tea from a little shop off Regent Street that was famous in her family for a certain kind of scone. The dentist’s man called a cab, and she and her nurse drove off very happily for the cakes and then all down Regent Street and through St. James’s Park home.
It was upon hearing her mother’s first words, “Was the ring good to you?” that Priscilla realized that she was no longer wearing it!
Her heart stood still.
She searched her gloves and her clothes and the bag with the cakes in it, and then she searched them again; but to no purpose.
Priscilla was the most miserable child in London. She would rather, she felt, have forty toothaches.
Directly after lunch, which she had the utmost difficulty in eating, she and her mother hurried off to the confectioner’s to see if the ring was there; but it was not.
Then they went off to Scotland Yard to describe it to the police and see if the cabman had by any chance found it and taken it there.