At half-past seven the next evening he was again at the house of Kirby Griggs. The ring had been redeemed in the interim. It was what the lawyer’s clerk had described it as being, a plain massive hoop of gold, but on the inner side Lisle’s keen eyes detected what seemed to him like a faint tracery of some kind, but apparently so worn that without the help of a magnifying glass it was impossible to make out what it was intended to represent. Griggs, who admitted that he had noticed the marks, but without attaching any value to them, volunteered to obtain the loan of a lens from a working watchmaker who lived close by, and accordingly did so. With the aid of the lens and the exercise of some patience, Everard was enabled to make out that what to the naked eye had looked like so many meaningless scratches was in reality an engraved inscription which ran thus: “J. A. C. to G. R. _Pour tout temps_.” Scarcely had he succeeded in deciphering the inscription before it flashed across him that the words, “_Pour tout temps_” formed the somewhat arrogant motto of the Clares of Withington Chase, as also that the letters J. A. C. were the initials of John Alexander Clare. By the time he got away from the house, taking the ring with him, it was too late to think of going down to the Chase before next morning. So he wandered about some of the quieter streets till a late hour, turning over and over in his mind his discovery in connection with the ring, but nowhere finding an adequate solution of the singular problem which was thus put before him. From whichever point of view he looked at the matter, it still remained as much a tangle as at first. Out of a dozen questions which he asked himself, there was not one he could answer. He turned into his hotel a little before midnight and went to bed, but sleep came to him only by fits and starts, and all through the dark hours the same series of questions kept ringing their changes in his brain. After an early breakfast he caught the eight-thirty train for Mapleford. A fly took him and his luggage from the station to Elm Lodge, from whence, a few minutes later, he walked across the park to the Chase. Sir Gilbert had lingered over breakfast, talking to his son, and in the corridor Everard met him face to face, looking a dozen years younger than when he had seen him last. The change in him was indeed marvellous.