If he had said a funeral memento to the dead, his voice could not have been more lugubrious.
"How interesting!" murmured Cynthia Strong. "Even in those days the mental qualities were deemed superior to mere physical attractions."
"I beg your pardon," retorted the professor quite tartly. "Order, as used here, means complete, perfect; according to our modern speech, beautiful. Truth has also a secondary meaning. A free, but at the same time accurate, translation would be 'Beautiful, constant, chaste.'"
Rick Halmar was twisting the ring about in his strong deft hands. "I expect some beggar gave it to his wife," he said cheerfully. "It must have been just as jolly then as now to have somebody to stick by you through thick and thin. To have the dinner ready, and not swear if you hadn't done what you ought to have done. Not brought in enough fish for the kids, for instance; though how they ever caught any with those bone hooks, I can't think. I couldn't."
"You must remember the great incentive of hunger," remarked the professor in the same tone. "Besides, in those days dexterity in the chase was the master key to a woman's affections."
"I say, Weeks, old man! why weren't you born then?" cried Rick, happily unconscious of all complications.
"Never had any luck," muttered the other, "except with the birds."
"Luck! I like that! You call it luck when you never miss; I assure you, Miss Strong," he continued, going up to where the despondent captain was standing, and addressing the nearest lady, "I was out with him yesterday, and he made me feel such a duffer. The prettiest shooting, and then he calls it luck!"
Cynthia Strong looked from one to the other of those two vigorous young faces before her, and then at the professor's pale one. A cold in the head is not becoming, and she sighed.
Rick, with the ring still in his possession, returned to Lady Maud.