'
'In discharge of a trust, I have handed Mr. Edwin Drood a ring of
diamonds and rubies. You see?'
Edwin reproduced the little case, and opened it; and Bazzard looked
into it.
'I follow you both, sir,' returned Bazzard, 'and I witness the
transaction.'
Evidently anxious to get away and be alone, Edwin Drood now resumed
his outer clothing, muttering something about time and
appointments. The fog was reported no clearer (by the flying
waiter, who alighted from a speculative flight in the coffee
interest), but he went out into it; and Bazzard, after his manner,
'followed' him.
Mr. Grewgious, left alone, walked softly and slowly to and fro, for
an hour and more. He was restless to-night, and seemed dispirited.
'I hope I have done right,' he said. 'The appeal to him seemed
necessary. It was hard to lose the ring, and yet it must have gone
from me very soon.'
He closed the empty little drawer with a sigh, and shut and locked
the escritoire, and came back to the solitary fireside.
'Her ring,' he went on. 'Will it come back to me? My mind hangs
about her ring very uneasily to-night. But that is explainable. I
have had it so long, and I have prized it so much! I wonder--'
He was in a wondering mood as well as a restless; for, though he
checked himself at that point, and took another walk, he resumed
his wondering when he sat down again.
'I wonder (for the ten-thousandth time, and what a weak fool I, for
what can it signify now!) whether he confided the charge of their
orphan child to me, because he knew--Good God, how like her mother
she has become!'
'I wonder whether he ever so much as suspected that some one doted
on her, at a hopeless, speechless distance, when he struck in and
won her.
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