"I beg your pardon," retorted the professor quite tartly. "Order, as used here, means complete, perfect; according to our modern speech, beautiful. Truth has also a secondary meaning. A free, but at the same time accurate, translation would be 'Beautiful, constant, chaste.'" Rick Halmar was twisting the ring about in his strong deft hands. "I expect some beggar gave it to his wife," he said cheerfully. "It must have been just as jolly then as now to have somebody to stick by you through thick and thin. To have the dinner ready, and not swear if you hadn't done what you ought to have done. Not brought in enough fish for the kids, for instance; though how they ever caught any with those bone hooks, I can't think. I couldn't." "You must remember the great incentive of hunger," remarked the professor in the same tone. "Besides, in those days dexterity in the chase was the master key to a woman's affections." "I say, Weeks, old man! why weren't you born then?" cried Rick, happily unconscious of all complications. "Never had any luck," muttered the other, "except with the birds." "Luck! I like that! You call it luck when you never miss; I assure you, Miss Strong," he continued, going up to where the despondent captain was standing, and addressing the nearest lady, "I was out with him yesterday, and he made me feel such a duffer. The prettiest shooting, and then he calls it luck!" Cynthia Strong looked from one to the other of those two vigorous young faces before her, and then at the professor's pale one. A cold in the head is not becoming, and she sighed. Rick, with the ring still in his possession, returned to Lady Maud. "Isn't it quaint?" he said. "Don't you wish I could find another?" "Why?" "Because it would be yours, of course. How small it looks! I wonder if it would fit you." "Miss Macdonald found it too large for her," remarked the professor, still more gloomily; "but it would be interesting, Lady Maud, to try whether it points to any improvement or deterioration--physical, of course--in the race." "Perhaps you ladies would not mind experimenting 'Cinderella and the little glass slipper,'" laughed Eustace Gordon. "What is to be the prize, Endorwick--the ring?" "My dear sir," gasped the professor, horrified for once out of his gallantry, "it's unique--positively unique." "I'll tell you what," put in Rick eagerly, "if the professor will lend it to me for a couple of days, I'll copy it in silver. A florin would make it, and the inscriptions only scratched on. So now, then, ladies, if you please. Weeks, you do herald. Lady Maud, may we use the banner screen as a tabard?" "What a boy that is!" said fat Lady Liddell to her next-door neighbour. "I've been here a fortnight, and never saw him out of temper or out of spirits. So different from most young people nowadays, who won't take the trouble to enjoy themselves."