"Yes, my dear."
"Mrs. Berry, you shall have another ring."
"Another, my dear?" Berry did not comprehend. "One's quite enough for the objeck," she remarked.
"I mean," Lucy touched her fourth finger, "I cannot part with this." She looked straight at Mrs. Berry.
That bewildered creature gazed at her, and at the ring, till she had thoroughly exhausted the meaning of the words, and then exclaimed, horror-struck: "Deary me, now! you don't say that? You're to be married again in your own religion."
The young wife repeated: "I can never part with it."
"But, my dear!" the wretched Berry wrung her hands, divided between compassion and a sense of injury. "My dear!" she kept expostulating like a mute.
"I know all that you would say, Mrs. Berry. I am very grieved to pain you. It is mine now, and must be mine. I cannot give it back."
There she sat, suddenly developed to the most inflexible little heroine in the three Kingdoms.
From her first perception of the meaning of the young bride's words, Mrs. Berry, a shrewd physiognomist, knew that her case was hopeless, unless she treated her as she herself had been treated, and seized the ring by force of arms; and that she had not heart for.