And, in fact, Aurelia’s eyes hardly sustained the comparison. A finer stone could not easily be found.
“Mine is a sapphire, azure as the everlasting heavens, and type of a constancy enduring as they.”
In truth, it was of a tint seldom to be met with in sapphires.
The exchange made, the lady seemed less anxious to detain her lover.
“Beware, Otto!” she cried, as he slid down the cord, which yielded him an oscillatory transit from her casement to the moat, where he alighted knee-deep in mud. “Beware!—if my brother should be gazing from his chamber on the resplendent moon!”
But that ferocious young baron was accustomed to spend his time in a less romantic manner; and so it came to pass that Otto encountered him not.
II
Days, weeks, months had passed by, and Otto, a wanderer in a foreign land, had heard no tidings of his Aurelia. Ye who have loved may well conceive how her ring was all in all to him. He divided his time pretty equally between gazing into its cerulean depths, as though her lovely image were mirrored therein, and pressing its chilly surface to his lips, little as it recalled the warmth and balminess of hers.
The burnished glow of gold, the chaste sheen of silver, the dance and sparkle of light in multitudinous gems, arrested his attention as he one evening perambulated the streets of a great city. He beheld a jeweller’s shop. The grey-headed, spectacled lapidary sat at a bench within, sedulously polishing a streaked pebble by the light of a small lamp. A sudden thought struck Otto; he entered the shop, and, presenting the ring to the jeweller, inquired in a tone of suppressed exultation:
“What hold you for the worth of this inestimable ring?”