rite, thy Aurelia could not read. Oh these dark ages!"

They remained some minutes gazing on each other with an expression of fond
perplexity. Suddenly the damsel's features assumed the aspect of one who
experiences the visitation of a happy thought. Gently yet decidedly she
pronounced:

"We will exchange rings."

They drew off their rings simultaneously. "This, Aurelia, was my
grandfather's."

"This, Otto, was my grandmother's, which she charged me with her dying
breath never to part with save to him whom alone I loved."

"Mine is a brilliant, more radiant than aught save the eyes of my Aurelia."

And, in fact, Aurelia's eyes hardly sustained the comparison. A finer stone
could not easily be found.

"Mine is a sapphire, azure as the everlasting heavens, and type of a
constancy enduring as they."

In truth, it was of a tint seldom to be met with in sapphires.

The exchange made, the lady seemed less anxious to detain her lover.

"Beware, Otto!" she cried, as he slid down the cord, which yielded him an
oscillatory transit from her casement to the moat, where he alighted
knee-deep in mud. "Beware!--if my brother should be gazing from his
chamber on the resplendent moon!"

But that ferocious young baron was accustomed to spend his time in a less
romantic manner; and so it came to pass that Otto encountered him not.

II

Days, weeks, months had passed by, and Otto, a wanderer in a foreign land,
had heard no tidings of his Aurelia. Ye who have loved may well conceive
how her ring was all in all to him. He divided his time pretty equally
between gazing into its cerulean depths, as though her lovely image were
mirrored therein, and pressing its chilly surface to his lips, little as it
recalled the warmth and balminess of hers.

The burnished glow of gold, the chaste sheen of silver, the dance and
sparkle of light in multitudinous gems, arrested his attention as he one
evening perambulated the streets of a great city. He beheld a jeweller's
shop. The grey-headed, spectacled lapidary sat at a bench within,
sedulously polishing a streaked pebble by the light of a small lamp. A
sudden thought struck Otto; he entered the shop, and, presenting the ring
to the jeweller, inquired in a tone of suppressed exultation:

"What hold you for the worth of this inestimable ring?"

The jeweller, with no expression of surprise or curiosity, received the
ring from Otto, held it to the light, glanced slightly at the stone,