Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/154

144 He produced a grimy piece of tissue-paper, and clumsily unrolled what was inside it, letting it lie on his large outstretched palm. It was an old-fashioned wedding-ring—a plain gold band, broad and heavy. "It was my mother's," he explained; "the one my own father gave her—not that brute. My own father was a good man. I thought I'd like you to have my mother's ring. I'd like to think of you wearing it sometimes, nights, when nobody'll see. I think my mother—she'd like to have you wear it, too. My mother used to talk to me a lot about keeping straight, and all that, for the sake of the nice refined girl I'd marry some day. I never thought she'd be so nice and refined as you, though, and I guess mother didn't either."

"I'll wear it every night," promised Reba, "and daytimes on a ribbon round my neck."

She held up her bare left hand. Gingerly he slipped the ring onto her third finger.

"Just fits!" exclaimed Reba.

"I thought your hands were just about the size of hers," the sailor replied. "I'm never going to let them get so rough and hard-worked though. They ought to be cared for, tender, same as flowers."

Reba smiled at that. "You talk just like a poet sometimes."

"Well," he replied, "when I was a kid in school, writing compositions and things, I used to think I'd like to be a poet." He paused. "Now all I want to be is rich, for you."

Reba slipped off the ring and passed it back.

"I don't care about your being rich," she said.

"Oh, I know what you mean. You'd rather have