“It’s a queer thing,” he muttered, “but a minute before I come across him, there’s nothing I could ha’ liked better than to lay hands on he! I’d ha’ had him by the throat and shook the life out of him same as that there dog ’ud shake it out of a rat! But when I see him lying there at my feet, dead and gone, I felt—I felt as if I couldn’t bide to touch a hand to his body! He was—dead! And yet I did a thing, and it was through doing that I came to know that he was still warm.”
“Yes—yes!” breathed the Professor. “What, now?”
“I see a ring on his finger,” answered Roper simply. “The sort o’ ring that they gipsy women do trade off on the lanes hereabouts: a thing o’ no vally, you understands, but one that you’d notice. And it come on me—I dunno why—that my Myra had given it to him. And I pulled it off his finger, and I went away wi’ it, leaving him there, a-staring at the sky!”
The Professor let out a long sigh. But Blick spoke.
“What have you done with that ring, Roper?” he asked.
“’Tis here!” said Roper, putting two fingers in his waistcoat pocket. “’Tis in my mind that my poor lass gave it to he! Her was fond o’ gew-gaws o’ that sort. Many’s the time her’d been took in by they gipsy-women, trading a bit o’ poor trash o’ that sort to her for good money. But it’s in me to think ’twas hers, and I wasn’t going to let he carry that to his grave!”
“Well, you were wrong,” said Blick, with remorseless candour. “Mrs. Tretheroe gave that ring to Guy Markenmore, and he gave Mrs. Tretheroe another exactly like it. They bought them in an old curiosity shop on Portsmouth Hard. It was never Myra’s.”
Roper looked fixedly at the detective. Blick nodded. And at that Roper, who had been turning the ring over in the palm of his hand, suddenly threw it on the ground before him with a gesture of dislike.
“I had thought it med be!” he muttered. “But since it isn’t——”
Blick picked up the ring and rose to his feet.