She obeyed, but when she felt a ring being slipped upon the third finger of her left hand her eyes flew open and found a sapphire to match them. For the ring that David had bought for her was a plain loop of white gold, with a deep-blue sapphire in an old-fashioned Tiffany mounting, such as tradition has made sacred to engagement rings. “Oh, David!” She laid her hand against her cheek, pressing the stone so hard that it left its many-faceted imprint upon her flesh. Then she had to kiss it and David had to kiss it—and her. “I wish it could have been a diamond,” David deprecated. “I suppose all girls prefer diamond engagement rings. But—” “Oh, David, is it an engagement ring?” she breathed, then flung herself upon his breast, her hands clinging to his shoulders. “Of course it is, precious idiot!” he laughed. Very gently but insistently he forced her face upward, so that their eyes met and clung. His were boyishly ardent but solemn, hers were misted over with tears, but brighter and bluer than the stone upon her finger. “I don’t know when we can be married, Sally, but—I wanted you to have a ring and to know that I’ll always be thinking and planning and—oh, I can’t talk! You want to be engaged, don’t you, Sally? You love me—enough?” “I adore you. I love you so that I feel I am not even half a person when you’re not with me. I couldn’t live without you, David,” she said solemnly. They were still sitting there, talking, planning, making love shyly but ardently, when Gus, the barker, mounted the box outside the tent and began to ballyhoo for the first show of the morning. “Eleven o’clock and I’m not in make-up yet, and you’ve got to run the wheel for Eddie today,” Sally cried in dismay, jumping to her feet and gathering up her scattered purchases and presents. As the day wore on, with show after show drawing record crowds for a village of its size, “Princess Lalla” gazed more often into the shining blue depths of a small sapphire than into the magic depths of her crystal. But perhaps the sapphire had a magic of its own, for never had her audiences been better pleased, never had quarters been thrust so thick and fast upon her. At half-past nine that night, Gus, the barker, had not quite finished his “spiel” about the Princess Lalla when the girl, whose eyes had been fixed trance-like upon her ring, saw a woman suddenly begin to ascend the steps to the platform. Before her startled eyes had traveled upward to the woman’s face Sally knew who it was. For twelve years that big, stiffly corseted, severely dressed body had been as familiar to her as her own. Instinctively, though her blood had turned instantly to ice water in her veins, Sally’s right hand closed over her left, to conceal the sapphire. Thelma had not been permitted to keep even a bit of blue glass—