Otto’s blood ran chill, but he mustered sufficient courage to inquire hoarsely: 

“What of its further virtues?”

“When it shall have pricked thee,” returned the mysterious personage, “on turning it once completely round thy finger thou wilt see thy mistress wherever she may be.  If thou turnest it the second time, thou wilt know what her thought of thee is; and, if the third time, thou wilt find thyself in her presence.  But I give thee fair warning that by doing this thou wilt place thyself in a more disastrous plight than any thou hast experienced hitherto.  And now farewell.”

The speaker disappeared.  Otto stood alone upon the bridge.  He saw nothing around him but the stream, with its shadows and lights, as he slowly and thoughtfully turned round to walk to his lodgings.

III

Ye who have loved, et cetera, as aforesaid, will comprehend the anxiety with which Otto henceforth consulted his ring.  He was continually adjusting it to his finger in a manner, as he fancied, to render the anticipated puncture more perceptible when it should come at last.  He would have worn it on all his fingers in succession had the conformation of his robust hand admitted of its being placed on any but the slenderest.  Thousands of times he could have sworn that he felt the admonitory sting; thousands of times he turned the trinket round and round with desperate impatience; but Aurelia’s form remained as invisible, her thoughts as inscrutable, as before.  His great dread was that he might be pricked in his sleep, on which account he would sit up watching far into the morn.  For, as he reasoned, not without plausibility, when could he more rationally hope for a place in Aurelia’s thoughts than at that witching and suggestive period?  She might surely think of him when she had nothing else to do!  Had she really nothing else to do?  And Otto grew sick and livid with jealousy.  It of course frequently occurred to him to doubt and deride the virtues of the ring, and he was several times upon the point of flinging it away.  But the more he pondered upon the appearance and manner of the stranger, the less able he felt to resist the conviction of his truthfulness.

At last a most unmistakable puncture! the distinct, though slight, pang of a miniature wound.  A crimson bead of blood rose on Otto’s finger, swelled to its due proportion, and became a trickling blot.

“She is thinking of me!” cried he rapturously, as if this were an instance of the most signal and unforeseen condescension.  All the weary expectancy of the last six months was forgotten.  He would have railed at himself had the bliss of the moment allowed him to remember that he had ever railed at her.

Otto turned his ring once, and Aurelia became visible in an instant.  She was standing before the mercer’s booth in the chief street of the little town which adjoined her father’s castle.  Her gaze was riveted on a silk mantle, trimmed with costly furs, which depended from a hook inside the doorway.  Her lovely features wore an expression of extreme dissatisfaction.  She was replacing a purse, apparently by no means weighty, in her embroidered girdle.