“By Jove! look there!” he said.

“What is it?”

“Look at her hand.”

I looked.  I saw a hand which was a claw, a strong, shriveled thing with long, dirty nails and a vulturous suggestion.  It was not a pleasant sight.  On the third finger of the left hand, though, was a slight gleam amid the carnivorous dullness.  There was a slender band of gold there, a ring worn down to narrowness and thinness.  I turned to Harlson, but he spoke first: 

“Do you see that old wedding ring?”

“Yes.”

“It’s queer.  It’s good, too.  There’s a streak of what was good left in everything, it seems to me.  I’m going to talk to her.”

“Don’t do it.  She’ll throw the plate in your face.”

“No, she won’t.”  And he rose and went over to the table of the beldame and sat down beside her.  She looked up at him glaringly.  He did not smile, nor, apparently, make any apology or excuse, but began talking to her, looking at the ring, and saying I know not what.  And I watched that miserable old woman’s face and wondered.  There was more than one emotion shown—­fierce resentment at first, then the half fear of the hound or the hound-bitch yielding to the master, and then the yielding of the heart, not touched, perhaps, for a quarter of a century.  Harlson talked.  The woman did not speak for minutes, then made some short reply, and then, a little later, there were tears in her old foxy eyes.

He rose, glared at the one or two hard-faced waiters who had ventured near him, and took upon a card something she said.  Then he came back to me as the old woman left the place.

“Queer-looking, wasn’t she?” he said.

“Decidedly,” said I.  “What were you talking about?”

“Oh, nothing but the ring.  It’s wonderful how they always wear the ring when they have the right to.”

“But what was the use of it all?  What came of your talk?”

“Nothing to speak of.  It was only a fad of mine.  I have a right to an occasional whim, haven’t I?  I’ll be hanged if I’ll see a wedding ring worn that way buried in unbought ground.  The old hag was a marvel of all that is unwomanly and sinful.  But that ring shall be properly buried, and the hand that wears it, because it does wear it.  So I’m going to take the woman out of this and put her where she will not have to be a monster in order to live.”

And he did what he said he would do.  He found a place in some old women’s home for that aged demon, and one day he made me go with him to see her.  Maybe it was the different dress and the different surroundings, but, it seemed to me, her eyes were not as they were in the low restaurant.  The hand that wore the thin gold ring was clean in its pitiful shrunkenness.  The creature looked neither hunted nor hunting.  She was but an old woman going to the grave so near her, and going, I could not but imagine, to find the one who had given her that gold circlet some half century ago.  I rather fancied Harlson’s fad.  As for him, when I told him so, he only said: