“Better begin now,” urged Alice.
“Well, I will next time,” said Emma, impatiently. “But there’s no use in bringing this up again. It has passed off now, and he’ll never think of it again; so let the matter rest—it is ended now.”
But here Emma was mistaken. She met Mr. Cooper at a small party in the evening; and to her annoyance, the ring was on his little finger. Some one said, “Cooper, what ring is that you are flourishing?” and the young man smiled in reply, and looked at his little finger caressingly, and said it was “a ring he valued very highly.” Whereupon some badinage followed; all of which Mr. Cooper took very kindly. Emma was excessively vexed and annoyed, although she commanded herself to look calm and indifferent; but afterward she took an opportunity to say to him, in a low voice, “You must return me that ring.”
“You surely are not in earnest. You will not be so cruel,” he replied in a tone equally low.
Just then she caught Mr. Dashwood’s eye, who looked surprised at the sort of intimacy with which they seemed to be talking, and she hastily turned away. Mr. Cooper caught the look at the same time; and the idea instantly occurred to him that Dashwood was jealous. The idea both gratified and amused him; and in a spirit of fun, which often animates young men under such circumstances, he determined to add to his uneasiness. Beside, he saw that Emma was decidedly annoyed; and as she had treated him with some caprice, he thought this a good opportunity for ‘paying her off;’ and so he took particular pleasure in displaying the ring whenever he could. Emma could bear it no longer; and the first time he was by her, and no one else in the group, she said,
“I wish you would give me that ring.”
“What, now?” said the young man, glancing his eye toward Mr. Dashwood, who was just then approaching.
“No,” she replied, almost with a shiver, feeling at once how that would betray her. “Not now; send it to me to-morrow.” And then, as Mr. Dashwood joined them, she continued, in the same tone, to talk of other things.
Cooper saw his power over her, and determined to use it, partly in the spirit of fun, and yet not without a dash of malice in it either. So the next morning he wrote her a few lines, enclosing another ring of more value than hers, and “begging that it might be substituted in the place of one he treasured so highly, he could not readily bring himself to part with it.”
Emma was exceedingly angry. “Did you ever know any thing so impudent?” she said to Alice, with tears in her eyes. “Hateful creature! how could I be such a fool as ever to have let him take it at all!” And she opened her writing-desk to take out some note paper, when Alice said,