He had discovered on the day that she had accepted him, that it had to be emeralds to match the green lights that her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the mossy bank and the green boughs overhead.

On the terrace at Lessings' under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness for Eunice Goodward.
She had been very sweet about the ring, touched with grateful surprise for its beauty and its taste.

Something he could see of relief, of assurance, flashed and fell between the two women as she showed it to her mother.

They had taken him so beautifully on trust, they couldn't have known, he reflected, whether he would rise at all to the delicate, balanced observation of life among them; it was evidence, the emerald circlet, of how satisfyingly he had risen.

The look that passed between mother and daughter was like a spark that lighted as it fell, an unsuspected need of him as man merely, the male element, security, dependability, care.