(This one was hard to pare down. It ended at well over 500 words, but I've got it down to exactly 400.)

“Acaia needs a new harness,” old Flora muttered to herself, fondling the ring that she clutched in the gnarled palm of her hand. The gold ring that she had found, on the road would fetch enough money for all that she wanted and more besides.

Eustace searched the ground closely as he walked along the road and retraced the steps he had taken that morning. Then he saw old Flora, with the ring glinting in her hand as it reflected the morning sun.

“Dear little mother,” he said, “I lost that very ring this morning and I must have it back.”
“Your ring is it?” Flora said and curled her fingers around it. She looked at Eustace, in his fine robe, he who had never missed a meal by the look of him, or known what it was to sleep outdoors in the cold winter air.
“When my wife came to live with me,” Eustace said quietly, “I did not have very much money and could not buy her nice things. And she always said that it didn’t matter. But I was lucky and the Gods were good to me, and now I can buy her all the nice things in the world, if she asked for them. But all those years ago, there was a little ring that she liked well and I promised that I would get it for her one day.”
Flora smiled, “so you kept your promise then.” Eustace nodded. Flora sighed and pressed the ring into his hand.
“Then you should have it,” she said, “if it was promised.” Eustace kissed her dry old cheek and ran back along the road, all the way home.

Eustace looked down at his tired wife, safe and warm in her bed, with her newborn son in her arms.
“If I could give you anything at all, what would you want?” he said.
Eustace’s wife kissed the forehead of her sleeping son. “Nothing dear,” she said. “I have everything I could ever want. I am the happiest woman in the whole world.”

Eustace waited until his wife was asleep, and then, once again, he walked back along the road until he found Flora. He put the ring back in her hands and then went home.

Flora turned the gold band over and over in her fingers.
“Acaia needs a new harness,” she muttered to herself, as she walked home.

Moral: all that glitters is not gold (again); or, some things are more valuable than gold.