“By Jove! next Tuesday the grouse shooting commences, the glorious twelfth! I don’t know how I’m to break the news to you, Alice; but on Monday we must part. Old Macfarlane has asked me this year, thank the kind fates, and his moors and his shooting are simply--supreme. He asked Rex too, and was awfully keen about getting him, knowing him to be such a good gun--the old boy takes no end of pride out of his big bags--and only fancy,” standing in the pathway, and declaiming, with one waving arm, “he is _not_ going. Did you ever know such a duffer? Imagine his refusing the primest shooting north o’ Tweed! And for what? He gives no reason, and I can’t even hazard a guess. It certainly can’t be on _your_ account,” contemplating his cousin with a cool, deliberate, speculative stare. “If the question baffles your acute imagination, of course it is utterly beyond mine,” returned Alice, with an emphatic shake of her lovely head and a perceptible increase of colour. “See, Geoff,” she added eagerly, “the others are all going through the wood. We may as well go too; I want some moss and ferns for the dinner-table.” Having joined the rest of the party, a general search for ferns commenced, and they were gradually moving homewards, when a masterly manœuvre of Geoffrey’s left Alice and Reginald to bring up the rear alone--a most unpremeditated _tête-à-tête_. As they crossed a rustic bridge that spanned a small but rapid torrent, they paused and looked down at the foam sailing along in solid-looking blocks; at the wet and mossy rocks, and the small noisy waterfall. “How I should like to go down there and dabble!” said Alice, taking off her gloves. In pulling off the left one she also drew off her wedding-ring, which instantly disappeared in the current below. She looked after it, or rather at the spot where it had fallen in, in silent consternation; then, turning to her husband with awestruck face, exclaimed: “My ring is gone! What _am_ I to do?” “I’m sure I can’t say,” he replied coldly. “Can’t you fish it up some way--if you were to wade in?” she cried excitedly. “I don’t know what _you_ call wading, but the water there is at least nine feet deep, and your ring is probably a quarter of a mile off by this time,” he answered, with provoking indifference. “But what am I to do for my wedding-ring?” she urged piteously, looking down at her hand with burning cheeks. “Buy another, I conclude; you can get one for a guinea or thirty shillings. It depends upon whether you like them thick or thin. This will be your _third_, so you must have quite a settled opinion on the subject,” he replied, calmly aiming bits of gravel at a particular rock in the torrent below. Certainly this was not encouraging behaviour; nevertheless, she braced up her courage, and determined to make one more attempt to recover her original ring. “Give me my own ring, Reginald.” “I have already told you, Alice, that I will _not_,” he returned, still pursuing his amusement.