CHAPTER I.
“Do you think it unlucky, then, to take off one’s wedding-ring?”
The inquiry sprang with a half-startled air of surprise and alarm from a pair of pretty half-parted lips, and still more eagerly from two heavily-fringed and expressive gray eyes.
“Yes, dear, very unlucky; you ought to leave it where your husband placed it; it is like undoing the ceremony to take it off.”
This most depressing reply was made with an air of conviction which greatly disturbed the fair questioner—the bride of a month—who had in a childish fit of restlessness removed her wedding-ring and was engaged testing the stupendousness of its avoirdupois on the coral tips of her dainty fingers.
Slowly, and as if it were something uncanny, the truant hoop was slipped back to its place, as the delicate flush on the young wife’s cheek deepened with the dawning consciousness of a hitherto unknown crime.
“I wish you would tell me why you think so, grandma,” was the somewhat timid rejoinder.
The elder lady’s busy hands had dropped on her knees, and her face wore the absent-minded expression which told that “her eyes were with her heart, and that was far away.”
The question was evidently unheard, and it was presently amended.