Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 12 (1943-07).djvu/82

 The roast was done. The table was all set. The potatoes had been mashed and the salad was made. Everything ready to go on the table.

"There," he said weakly. "See that?"

Agatha was smiling. "Of course. It's the ring"

Walter fought down the black wave of panic that closed on his insides. "Then you'll get rid of it? Sell it, or—"

"Of course not. I rather like this ring now. Sort of fascinating." She kept staring at it.

Walter argued and pleaded all through supper, but to no avail. Agatha liked the ring. She would wear it tomorrow morning to church and nothing Walter could say or do would change her mind.

That was that.

T CHURCH services next morning, all their neighborhood acquaintances were properly awed by Agatha's new coat. They oh'd and ah'd, as Agatha smirked, and displayed it to her heart’s content.

A dull, fatalistic feeling had fallen upon Walter. He did not even respond to his wife's most barbed insults, paid no heed to her hisses of "Walter! Sit up straight. Everybody's looking at us!"

But as the services slowly dragged through the next hour, Agatha stopped prodding him. She was staring into the crystal on her finger, as if hypnotized. Walter closed his eyes very tightly as he remembered what he had read

Somehow he couldn't stop trembling.

At the conclusion of the hymns, the pastor turned to the congregation and lifted his hands for the blessing.

This was it. Walter held his breath.

The minister's voice thundered out.

"In God's name, may peace reign!"

As the pastor uttered the words, Walter felt Agatha stiffen beside him.

Then she screamed. Horribly.

Everywhere there was commotion, the babble of excited voices, people craning and demanding to know what had happened, ushers exclaiming and hurrying forward.

Very slowly, Walter Simmons turned. He looked at Agatha's face.

Her eyes were wide and staring, and at the expression in them, he felt the short hairs bristle at the nape of his neck.

He looked at the ring.

He was not surprised to see the dim red glow gone, instead the crystal was white and lusterless, as if—whatever dwelt in it, had fled forever.

Walter wondered briefly, how the familiar had looked to Agatha, as it came out of the ring.

There were no complications. Heart failure, the coroner said.

At the funeral, many were the strange remarks at Walter Simmons' strange apathy.

"Don't look a bit sad," one of his friends whispered. "Well, that's not surprising either, if you knew how Agatha treated him. A regular shrew, she was."

The good neighbors of Walter Simmons might have been a great deal more concerned than they were, had they seen him the next night—seen him in the cemetery, digging furtively in a grave which could not have been over a week or two old. A grave with the name "Jonathan Miles" inscribed on the headstone.

They might have said much and wondered more, could they have seen the small crystal ring Walter left in the grave.

The ring which he was returning to its former owner.