Chapter I. - AFTER TWO YEARS.

“Come down and play!”

Ruth, looking down from the open lattice, smiled and shook her head.  “I must not; I’m doing my lessons.”

“Must not!” mimicked Master Dick.  “You’re getting stupider and stupider, living up here.  If you don’t look out, one of these days you’ll turn into an old maid - just like Miss Quiney.”

“Hs-s-sh!  She’s downstairs somewhere.”

“I don’t care if she hears.”  Dicky ran his eyes defiantly along the line of ground-floor windows under the verandah, then upturned his face again.  “After coming all this way on purpose to play with you,” he protested.

“You have made yourself dreadfully hot.”

“I am hot,” the boy confessed.  “I gave Piggy the slip at the foot of the hill, and I’ve run every step of the way.”

“Is he here?” Ruth glanced nervously toward a clump of elms around which the path from the entrance-gate curved into view.  “But you oughtn’t to call Mr. Silk ‘Piggy,’ you know.  It - it’s ungentlemanly.”

“Why, I took the name from you!  You said yourself, one day, that he was a pig; and so he is.  He has piggy eyes, and he eats too much, and there’s something about the back of his neck you must have noticed.”

“It’s cruel of you, Dicky, to remember and cast up what I said when I knew no better.  You know how hard I am learning:  in the beginning you helped me to learn.”

“Did I?” mused Dicky.  “Then I wish I hadn’t, if you’re going to grow up and treat me like this.  Oh, very well,” he added stoutly after a pause, “then I’m learning too, learning to be a sailor; and it’ll be first-rate practice to climb aloft to you, over the verandah.  You don’t mind my spitting on my hands?  It’s a way they have in the Navy.”

“Dicky, don’t be foolish!  Think of Miss Quiney’s roses.”  Finding him inexorable, Ruth began to parley.  “I don’t want to see Mr. Silk.  But if I come down to you, it will not be to play.  We’ll creep off to the Well, or somewhere out of hail, and there you must let me read - or perhaps I’ll read aloud to you.  Promise?”

“What’re you reading?”

“The Bible.”

Dicky pulled a face.  “Well, the Bible’s English, anyway,” he said resignedly.  The sound of a foreign tongue always made him feel pugnacious, and it was ever a question with him how, as a gentleman, to treat a dead language.  Death was respectable, but had its own obligations; obligations which Greek and Latin somehow ignored.

The house, known as Sabines, stood high on the slope of the midmost of Boston’s three hills, in five acres of ground well set with elms.  Captain Vyell had purchased the site some five years before, and had built himself a retreat away from the traffic that surged about his official residence by the waterside.  Of its raucous noises very few -  the rattle of a hawser maybe, or a boatswain’s whistle, or the yells of some stentorian pilot - reached to penetrate the belt of elms surrounding the house and its green garth; but the Collector had pierced this woodland with bold vistas through which the eye overlooked Boston harbour with its moving panorama of vessels, the old fort then standing where now stands the Navy Yard, and the broad waters of the Charles sweeping out to the Bay.

For eighteen months he, the master of this demesne, had not set foot within its front gate; not once since the day when on a sudden resolution he had installed Ruth Josselin here, under ward of Miss Quiney, to be visited and instructed in theology, the arts, and the sciences, by such teachers as that unparagoned spinster might, with his approval, select.  In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss Quiney’s taste in teachers was of the austerest.  What nutriment (one might well have asked) could a young mind extract from the husks of doctrine and of grammar purveyed to Ruth by the Reverend Malachi Hichens, her tutor in the Holy Scriptures and in the languages of Greece and Rome?

The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin.  Mr. Hichens might be dry - inhumanly dry - and his methods repellent; but there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger, wine for her thirst.  So too the harpsichord held music, though Miss Quiney’s touch upon it was formal and lifeless. . . .  In these eighteen months Ruth Josselin had been learning eagerly, teaching herself in a hundred ways and by devices of which she wist not.  Yet always she was conscious of the final purpose of this preparation; nay, it possessed her, mastered her.  For whatever fate her lord designed her, she would be worthy of it.

He never came.  For eighteen months she had not seen him.  Was it carelessly or in delicacy that he withheld his face?  Or peradventure in displeasure?  Her heart would stand still at times, and her face pale with the fear of it.  She could not bethink her of having displeased him; but it might well be that he repented of his vast condescension.  Almost without notice, and without any reason given, he had deported her to this house on the hill. . . .  Yet, if he repented, why did he continue to wrap her around with kindness?  Why had she these good clothes, and food and drink, servants to wait on her, tutors to teach her - everything, in short, but liberty and young companions and his presence that most of all she desired and dreaded?

On the slope to the south-west of the house, in a dingle well screened with willow and hickory, a stream of water gushed from the living rock and had been channelled downhill over a stairway of flat boulders, so that it dropped in a series of miniature cascades before shooting out of sight over the top of a ferny hollow.  The spot was a favourite one with Dicky, for between the pendent willow boughs, as through a frame, it overlooked the shipping and the broad bosom of the Charles.  Ruth and he stole away to it, unperceived of Miss Quiney; to a nook close beside the spray of the fall, where on a boulder the girl could sit and read while Dick wedged his back into a cushion of moss, somewhat higher up the slope, and recumbent settled himself so as to bring (luxurious young dog!) her face in profile between him and the shining distance.

She had stipulated for silence while she read her lesson over; but he at once began to beg off.

“If you won’t let me talk,” he grumbled, “the least you can do is to read aloud.”

“But it’s the Bible,” she objected.

“Oh, well, I don’t mind.  Only choose something interesting.  David and Goliath, or that shipwreck in the Acts.”

“You don’t seem to understand that this is a lesson, and I must read what Mr. Hichens sets.  To-day it’s about Hagar and Ishmael.”

“I seem to forget about them; but fire away, and we’ll hope there’s a story in it.”

Ruth began to read:  “And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking her.  Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman. . .”

She read on.  Before she ended Dicky had raised himself to a sitting posture.  “The whole business was a dirty shame,” he declared.  “This Ishmael was his own son, eh?  Then why should he cast out one son more than another?”

“There’s a long explanation in the New Testament,” said Ruth.  “It’s by St. Paul; and I dare say that Mr. Hichens too, if he sees anything difficult in it, will say that Ishmael stands for the bond and Isaac for the free, and Abraham had to do it, or the teaching wouldn’t come right.”

“He can’t make out it was fair; nor St. Paul can’t neither, not if you read it to him like you did to me,” asserted Dicky.

“But I shall not,” answered Ruth after a pause, “and it was rather clever of you to guess.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would shock him.  I used to find the Bible just as dull as he makes it out:  but one day I heard Mr. Langton standing up for it.  Mr. Langton said it was the finest book in the world and the most fascinating, if only you read it in the proper way; and the proper way, he said, is to forget all about its being divided into verses and just take it like any other book.  I tried that, and it makes all the difference.”

“You mean to say you like it?” asked Dicky, incredulous.

“I love it.  I can’t get away from the people in it.  They are so splendid, one moment; and, the next, they are just too mean and petty for words; and the queer part of it is, they never see.  They tell falsehoods, and they cheat, and the things they do to get into Palestine are simply disgusting - even if they had the shadow of a right there, which they haven’t.”

“But the land was promised to them.”

She had a mind to criticise that promise, but checked her lips.  He was a child, and she would do no violence to the child’s mind.

Getting no answer, he considered for a while, and harked back.  “But I don’t see,” he began, and halted, casting about to express himself.  “I don’t see why, if you read it like that to yourself, you should read it differently to old Hichens.  That’s a sort of pretending, you know.”

She turned her eyes on him, and they were straight and honest, as always.  “Oh,” said she, “you are a man, of course!”

Master Dicky blushed with pleasure.

“Men,” she went on, “can go the straight way to get what they wish.  The way is usually hard - it ought to be hard if the man is worth anything - but it is always quite straight and simple, else it is wrong.  Now women have to win through men; which means that they must go round about.”

“But old Hichens?”

To herself she might have answered, “He only is allowed to me here.  On whom else can I practise to please?  But, alas!  I practise for a master who never comes!” Aloud she said, “You are excited to-day, Dicky.  You have something to tell me.”

“I should think I had!”

“What is it?”

“It’s about Uncle Harry.  Dad showed me a letter from him to-day, and he’s fought a splendid action down off Grand Bahama.  Oh, you must hear!  It seems he’d been beating about in his frigate for close on three months - on and off the islands on the look-out for those Spanish fellows that snap up our fruit-ships.  Well, the water on board was beginning to smell; so he ran in through the nor’-west entrance of Providence Channel, anchored just inside, and sent his casks ashore to be refilled.  They’d taken in the fresh stock, and the Venus was weighing for sea again almost before the last boatload came alongside. - Can’t you see her, the beauty!  One anchor lifted, t’other chain shortened in, tops’ls and t’gallants’ls cast off, ready to cant her at the right moment -

“Is that how they do it?”

“Of course it is.  Well just then Uncle Harry spied a boat beating in through the entrance.  He had passed her outside two days before - one of those small open craft that dodge about groping for sponges - splendid naked fellows, the crews are.  She had put about and run back in search of him, and her news was of a Spanish guarda-costa making down towards Havana with three prizes.  Think of it!  Uncle Harry was off and after them like a greyhound, and at sunrise next morning he sighted them in a bunch.  He had the wind of them and the legs of them; there isn’t a speedier frigate afloat than the Venus - although, he says, she was getting foul with weed:  and after being chased for a couple of hours the Spaniard and two of the prizes hauled up and showed fight.  Now for it! . . .  He ran past the guarda-costa, drawing her fire, but no great harm done; shot up under the sterns of the two prizes, that were lying not two hundred yards apart; and raked ’em with half-a-broadside apiece - no time, you see, to reload between.  It pretty well cleaned every Spaniard off their decks - Why are you putting your hands to your ears!”

“Go on,” said Ruth withdrawing them.

“By this, of course, he had lost way and given the guarda-costa the wind of him.  But she couldn’t reach the Venus for twenty minutes and more, because of the prizes lying helpless right in her way, and in half that time Uncle Harry had filled sail again and was manoeuvring out of danger.  Bit by bit he worked around her for the wind’ard berth, got it, bore down again and hammered her for close upon three hours.  She fought, he says, like a rat in a sink, and when at last she pulled down her colours the two prizes had patched up somehow and were well off for Havana after the third, that had showed no fight from the beginning.  Quick as lightning he gets his prisoners on board, heads off on the new chase, and by sundown has taken the prizes all three - the third one a timber-ship, full of mahogany . . .  That wasn’t the end of his luck, either; for the captain of the guarda-costa turned out to be a blackguard that two years ago took a British captain prisoner and cut off his ears, which accounts for his fighting so hard.  ’Didn’t want to meet me if he could help it,’ writes Uncle Harry, and says the man wouldn’t haul down the flag till his crew had tied him up with ropes.”

“What happened to him?”

“Uncle Harry shipped him off to England.  This was from Carolina, where he sailed in with all the four vessels in convoy.  And now, guess!  He has refitted there, and is sailing around for Boston, and papa has promised to ask him to take me for a cruise, to see if he can make a sailor of me!”

“But that won’t be for years.”

“Oh yes, it will.  You can join the Navy at any age.  They ship you on as a cabin-boy, or sometimes as the Captain’s servant; and papa says that for the first cruise Uncle Harry’s wife will look after me.”

“But” - Ruth opened beautiful eyes of astonishment.  “Your Uncle Harry is not married?  Why, more than once you have told me that you would never take a wife when you grew up, but be like your uncle and live only for sailing a ship and fighting.”

“He is, though.  It happened at Carolina, whilst the Venus was refitting; and I believe her father is Governor there, or something of the sort, but I didn’t read that part of the letter very carefully.  There was a lot of silly talk in it, quite different from the fighting.  I remember, though, he said he was coming around here for his honeymoon; and I’m glad, on the whole.”

“On the whole?  When you’ve dreamed, all this while, of seeing your uncle and growing up to be like him!”

“I mean that on the whole I’m glad he is married.  It - it shows the two things can go together after all; and, Ruth -

She turned in some wonderment as his voice faltered, and wondered more at sight of his young face.  It was crimson.

“No, please!  I want you not to look,” he entreated.  “I want you to turn your face away and listen . . .  Ruth,” he blurted, “I love you better than anybody in the whole world!”

“Dear Dicky!”

“ - and I think you’re the loveliest person that ever was - besides being the best.”

“It’s lovely of you, at any rate, to think so.”  Ruth, forgetting his command, turned her eyes again on Dicky, and they were dewy.  For indeed she loved him and his boyish chivalrous ways.  Had he not been her friend from the first, taking her in perfect trust, and in the hour that had branded her and in her dreams seared her yet?  Often, yet, in the mid-watches of the night she started out of sleep and lay quivering along her exquisite body from head to heel, while the awful writing awoke and crawled and ate again, etching itself upon her flesh.

“But - but it made me miserable!” choked Dicky.

“Miserable!  Why?”

“Because I wanted to grow up and marry you,” he managed to say defiantly.  “And the two things didn’t seem to fit at all.  I couldn’t make them fit.  But of course,” he went on in a cheerfuller voice, the worst of his confession over, “if Uncle Harry can be married, why shouldn’t we?”

She bent her head low over the book.  Calf-love is absurd, but so honest, so serious; and like all other sweet natural foolishness should be sacred to the pure of heart.

“I ought to tell you something though,” he went on gravely and hesitated.

“Yes, Dicky!  What is it?”

“Well, I don’t quite know what it means, and I don’t like to ask any one else.  Perhaps you can tell me. . . .  I wouldn’t ask it if it weren’t that I’d hate to take you in; or if I could find out any other way.”

“But what is it, dear?”

“Something against me.  I can’t tell what, though I’ve looked at myself again and again in the glass, trying.”  He met her eyes bravely, with an effort.  “Ruth, dear - what is a bastard?”

Ruth sat still.  Her palms were folded, one upon another, over the book on her knees.

“But what is it?” he pleaded.

“It means,” she said quietly, “a child whose father and mother are not married - not properly married.”

A pause followed - a long pause - and the tumbling cascade sounded louder and louder in Ruth’s ears, while Dicky considered.

“Do you think,” he asked at length “that papa was not properly married to my mother?”

“No, dear - no.  And even if that were so, what difference could it make to my loving you?”

“It wouldn’t make any!  Sure?”

“Sure.”

“But it might make a difference to papa,” he persisted, “if ever papa had another child - like Abraham, you know - ” Here he jumped to his feet, for she had risen of a sudden.  “Why, what is the matter?”

She held out a hand.  There were many dragon-flies by the fall, and for the moment he guessed that one of them had stung her.

“Dicky,” she said.  “Whatever happens, you and I will be friends always.”

“Always,” he echoed, taking her hand and ready to search for the mark of the sting.  But her eyes were fastened on the water bubbling from the well head.

A branch creaked aloft, and to the right of the well head the hickory bushes rustled and parted.

“So here are the truants!” exclaimed a voice.  “Good-morning, Miss Josselin!”

Chapter II. - MR. SILK.

The Reverend Nahum Silk, B.A., sometime of St. Alban’s Hall, Oxford, had first arrived in America as a missioner seeking a sphere of labour in General Oglethorpe’s new colony of Georgia.  He was then (1733-4) a young man, newly admitted to priest’s orders, and undergoing what he took to be a crisis of the soul.  Sensual natures, such as his, not uncommonly suffer in youth a combustion of religious sentiment.  The fervour is short-lived, the flame is expelled by its own blast, and leaves a house swept and garnished, inviting devils.

For the hard fare of Georgia he soon began to seek consolations, and early in the second year of his ministry a sufficiently gross scandal tumbled him out of the little colony.  Lacking the grit to return to England and face out his relatives’ displeasure, he had drifted northwards to Massachusetts, and there had picked up with a slant of luck.  A number of godly and well-to-do citizens of Boston had recently banded themselves into an association for supplying religious opportunities to the seamen frequenting the port, and to the Committee Mr. Silk commended himself by a hail-fellow manner and a shrewdness of speech which, since it showed through a coat of unction, might be supposed to mean shrewdness in grain.  Cunning indeed the man could be, for his short ends; but his shrewdness began and ended in a trick of talking, and in the conduct of life he trimmed sail to his appetites.

His business of missioner (or, as he jocosely put it, Chaplain of the Fleet) soon brought him to the notice of Captain Vyell, Collector of Customs, with whom by the same trick of speech (slightly adapted) he managed to ingratiate himself, scenting the flesh-pots.  For he belonged to the tribe to whom a patron never comes amiss.  Captain Vyell was amused by the man; knew him for a sycophant; but tolerated him at table and promoted him (in Batty Langton’s phrase) to be his trencher chaplain.  He and Langton took an easy malicious delight, over their wine, in shocking Mr. Silk with their free thought and seeing how “the dog swallowed it.”

The dog swallowed his dirty puddings very cleverly, and with just so much show of protest as he felt to be due to his Orders.  He had the accent of an English gentleman and enough of the manner to pass muster.  But the Collector erred when he said that “Silk was only a beast in his cups,” and he erred with a carelessness well-nigh wicked when he made the man Dicky’s tutor.

This step had coincided with the relegation of Ruth and Miss Quiney to Sabines; but whether by chance or of purpose no one but the Collector could tell.  Of his intentions toward the girl he said nothing, even to Batty Langton.  Very likely they were not clear to himself.  He knew well enough how fast and far gossip travelled in New England; and doubted not at all that his adventure at Port Nassau had within a few days been whispered and canvassed throughout Boston.  His own grooms, no doubt, had talked.  But he could take a scornful amusement in baffling speculation while he made up his own mind.  In one particular only he had been prompt - in propitiating Miss Quiney.  On reaching home, some hours ahead of the girl, he had summoned Miss Quiney to his library and told her the whole story.  The interview on her part had been exclamatory and tearful; but the good lady, with all her absurdities, was a Christian.  She was a woman too, and delighted to serve an overmastering will.  She had left him with a promise to lay her conscience in prayer before the Lord; and, next morning, Ruth’s beauty had done the rest.

“Good-morning, Miss Josselin!” Ruth started and glanced up the slope with a shiver.  The voice of Mr. Silk always curdled her flesh.

“La! la!” went on Mr. Silk, nodding down admiration.  “What a group to startle! - Cupid extracting a thorn from the hand of Venus - or (shall we say?) the Love god, having wounded his mother in sport, kisses the scratch to make it well.  Ha, ha!”

“Shall I continue, sir?” said Ruth, recovering herself.  “The pair are surprised by a satyr who crept down to the spring to bathe his aching head -

“Hard on me, as usual!” Mr. Silk protested, climbing down the slope.  “But ’tis the privilege of beauty to be cruel.  As it happens, I drank moderately last night, and I come with a message from the Diana of these groves.  Miss Quiney wishes to communicate to you some news I have had the honour to bring in a letter from Captain Vyell - or, as we must now call him, Sir Oliver.”

“Sir Oliver?” echoed Ruth, not understanding at all.

“The Fish-hawk arrived in harbour this morning with the English mail-bags; and the Collector has letters informing him that his uncle, Sir Thomas Vyell, is dead after a short illness - the cause, jail fever, contracted while serving at Launceston, in Cornwall, on the Grand Jury.”

“Captain Vyell succeeds?”

“To the title and, I believe, to very considerable estates.  His uncle leaves no male child.”

“Dicky had not told me of this.”

“ - Because,” explained the boy, “I didn’t know what it meant, and I don’t know now.  Papa told me this morning that his uncle was dead, home in England; but I’d never heard of him, and it slipped out of my mind.  Can titles, as you call them, be passed on like that?  And if papa died, should I get one?  Or would it go to Uncle Harry?”

“It would go to your uncle,” said Mr. Silk.  “Now run along to the house and tell Miss Quiney that I have found the pair of you.  She was getting anxious.”

Dicky hesitated.  He knew that Ruth had a horror of his tutor.

“Yes, run,” she commanded, reading his glance.  “We follow at once.”

The boy scrambled up the slope.  Mr. Silk looked after him and chuckled.

“Dicky don’t know yet that there are two sides to a blanket.”

Getting no answer - for she had turned and was stooping to pick up her book - he went on, “Vyell had a letter, among others, from the widow, Lady Caroline; and that, between ourselves, is the cause of my errand.  She writes that she is taking a trip across here, to restore her nerves, and is bringing her daughter for company.  The daughter, so near as I gather, is of an age near-about Vyell’s.  See?”

“I am afraid I do not.”  Ruth had recovered her book and her composure.  A rose-flush showed yet on either cheek, but it lay not within Mr. Silk’s competence to read so delicate a signal.  “Will you explain?”

“Well” - he leered - “it did occur to me there might be some cleverness in the lady’s search after consolation.  Her daughter and our Collector being cousins - eh?  At any rate, that’s her first thought; to bring the girl - woman, if you prefer it - over and renew acquaintance with the heir.  Must be excused if I misjudge her.  Set it down to zeal for you, Miss Josselin.”

“Willingly, Mr. Silk - if your zeal for me did not outrun my understanding.”

“Yet you’re clever.  But you won’t persuade me you don’t see the difficulty. . . .  Er - how shall I put it?  The Collector - we’ll have to get used to calling him Sir Oliver - is as cool under fire as any man this side of the Atlantic; fire of criticism, I mean.  There’s a limit though.  He despises Colonial opinion - that’s his pose; takes pride in despising it, encouraged by Langton.  But England? his family? - that’s another matter.  An aunt - and that aunt an earl’s daughter - If you’ll believe me, Miss Josselin, I’m a man of family and know the sort.  They’re incredible.  And the younger lady, if I may remind you, called Diana; which - er - may warn us that she, too, is particular about these things.”  Here Mr. Silk, having at length found his retort upon her similitude of the satyr, licked his lips.

Ruth drew up and stood tapping her foot.  “May I beg to be told exactly what has happened, sir?”

“What has happened?  What has happened is that Vyell is placing Sabines at the disposal of his aunt and cousin for so long as they may honour Boston with their presence.  He sends the Quiney word to pack and hold herself in readiness for a flitting.  Whither?  I cannot say; nor can he yet have found the temporary nest for you.  But doubtless you will hear in due course.  May I offer you my arm?”

“I thank you, no.  Indeed we will part here, unless you have further business in the house - and I gather that your errand there is discharged. . . .  One question - Captain Vyell sent his message by a letter, which Miss Quiney no doubt will show to me.  Did he further commission you with a verbal one?  You had better,” she added quietly, “be particular about telling me the truth; for I may question him, and for a discovered falsehood he is capable of beating you.”

“What I have said,” stammered the clergyman, “was - er - entirely on my own responsibility.  I - I conceived you would find it sympathetic -  helpful perhaps.  Believe me, Miss Josselin, I have considerable feeling for you and your - er - position.”

“I thank you.”  She dismissed him with a gentle curtsy.  “I feel almost sure you have been doing your best.”

Chapter III. - MR. HICHENS.

She turned and walked slowly back to the house.  Once within the front door and out of his sight, she was tempted to rush across the hall and up the stairs to her own room.  She was indeed gathering up her skirts for the run, when in the hall she almost collided with the Reverend Malachi Hichens, who stood there with his nose buried in a vase of roses, while behind his back his hands interwove themselves and pulled each at the other’s bony knuckles.

“Ah!” He faced about with a stiff bow, and a glance up at the tall clock.  “You are late this morning, Miss Josselin.  But I dare say my good brother Silk has been detaining you in talk?”

“On the contrary,” answered Ruth, “his talk has rather hastened me than not.”

They entered the library.  “Miss Quiney tells me,” he said, “that our studies are to suffer a brief interruption; that you are about to take a country holiday.  You anticipate it with delight, I doubt not?”

“Have I been, then, so listless a scholar?” she asked, smiling.

“No,” he answered.  “I have never looked on you as eager for praise, or I should have told you that your progress - in Greek particularly - has been exceptional; for a young lady, I might almost say, abnormal.”

“I am grateful to you at any rate for saying it now.  It happens that just now I wanted something to give me back a little self-respect.”

“But I do not suppose you so abnormal as, at your age, to undervalue a holiday,” he continued.  “It is only we elders who live haunted by the words ‘Work while ye have the light.’  If youth extract any moral from the brevity of life it is rather the pagan warning, Collige rosas.”

Her eyes rested on him, still smiling, but behind her smile she was wondering.  Did he - this dry, sallow old man, with the knock-knees and ungainly frame, the soiled bands, the black suit, threadbare, hideous in cut, hideous in itself (Ruth had a child’s horror of black) - did he speak thus out of knowledge, or was he but using phrases of convention?  Ruth feared and distrusted all religious folk - clergymen above all; yet instinct had told her at the first that Mr. Hichens was honest, even good in an unlovely fashion; and by many small daily tests she had proved this.  Was it possible that Mr. Hichens had ever gathered roses in his youth?  Was it possible that, expecting Heaven and professing a spiritual joy in redemption, a man could symbolise his soul’s state by wearing these dingy weeds?  Had he no sense of congruity, or was all religion so false in grain that it perverted not only the believer’s judgment but his very senses, turning white into black for him, and making beauty and ugliness change places?

“For my part,” said Mr. Hichens wistfully, “I regret the interruption; for I had even played with the thought of teaching you some Hebrew.”  He paused and sighed.  “But doubtless the Almighty denies us these small pleasures for our good. . . .  Shall we begin with our repetition?  I forget the number of the Psalm?”

“The forty-fifth,” said Ruth, finding the place and handing him the book. “My heart is inditing of a good matter:  I speak of the things which I have made unto the king.” . . .  She recited the opening lines very quietly, but her voice lifted at the third verse.  Beautiful words always affected her poignantly, but the language of the Bible more poignantly than any other, because her own unforgettable injury had been derived from it and sanctioned by it, and because at the base of things our enemies in this world are dearer to us than friends.  They cling closer.

Yet, - and paradox though it be - the Bible was the more alive to her because, on Mr. Langton’s hint, she had taken it like any other book, ignoring the Genevan division of verses and the sophisticated chapter headings.  Thus studied, it had revenged itself by taking possession of her.  It held all the fascination of the East, and little by little unlocked it - Abraham at his tent door, Rebekah by the fountain, her own namesake Ruth in the dim threshing-floor of Boaz, King Saul wrestling with his dark hour, the last loathly years of David, Jezebel at the window, Job on his dung-heap, Athaliah murdering the seed royal, and again Athaliah dragged forth by the stable-way and calling Treason!  Treason! . . .  Bedouins with strings of camels, scent of camels by the city gate, clashing of distant cymbals, hush of fear - plot and counterplot in the apartments of the women - outcries, lusts, hates -  blood on the temple steps - blood oozing, welling across the gold - blood caking in spots upon illimitable desert sands - watchmen by the wall - in the dark streets a woman with bleeding back and feet seeking and calling, “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved -

“Hearken, O daughter, and consider, incline thine ear” - Ruth’s voice swelled up on a full note:  “forget also thine own people and thy father’s house.”

“So shall the King have pleasure in thy beauty:  for he is thy lord, and worship thou him.”

“Excuse me - ’for he is thy Lord God,’” corrected Mr. Hichens. . . .  “We are taking the Prayer Book’s version.”

“I changed to the Bible version on purpose,” Ruth confessed; “and ‘lord’ ought to have a small ‘l’.  The Prayer Book makes nonsense of it.  They are bringing in the bride, the princess, to her lord. She is all glorious within, her clothing is of wrought gold.  She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework:  the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company -

“The Hebrew,” said Mr. Hichens, blinking over his own text which he had hastily consulted, “would seem to bear you out, or at least to leave the question open.  But, after all, it matters little, since, as the chapter heading explains in the Authorized Version, the supposed bride is the Church, and the bridegroom, therefore, necessarily Our Lord.”

“Do you think that, or anything like that, was in the mind of the man who wrote it?” asked Ruth, rebellious.  “The title says, ’To the Chief Musician upon Shoshannim’ - whatever that may mean.”

“It means that it was to be sung to a tune called Shoshannim or Lilies -  doubtless a well-known one.”

“It has a beautiful name, then; and he calls it too ’Maschil, A song of Loves.’”

“Historically no doubt you are right,” agreed Mr. Hichens.  “The song is undoubtedly later than David, and was written as a Prothalamion for a royal bride.  It is, as you say, exceedingly beautiful; but perhaps we had best confine our attention to its allegorical side.  You probably do not guess who the bride was?”

“No,” Ruth admitted.  “Who was she?”

“It is generally admitted, I believe, to have been written as a bridal hymn for Queen Jezebel.”

“O - oh!” Ruth bit her lip, but had to laugh in spite of herself.

Chapter IV. - VASHTI.

The first bad suggestion almost certainly came from Mr. Silk.  Two or three of the company afterwards put their heads together and, comparing recollections, agreed that either Silk or Manley had started it.  Beyond the alternative they could not trace it.

But the whole table, they admitted, had been to blame, and pretty damnably.  To be sure they were drunk, every man Jack of them, the Collector included.  The Collector, indolent by nature but capable of long stretches of work at a pinch, had been at his desk since six o’clock in the morning.  The news brought by the Fish-hawk had reached him at five; and after bathing, dressing, and drinking his chocolate, he had started to write, and had been writing letters all day.  The most of these were lengthy, addressed to England, to his relatives, his London lawyers, the steward at Carwithiel. . . .  The Surveyor and Deputy-Collector could deal - as they usually did - with the official correspondence of the Custom House; his own Secretary had the light task of penning a score of invitations to dinner; but these letters of condolence and private business must be written by his own hand, as also a note to Governor Shirley formally announcing his accession and new title.

The Collector dined at five.  He laid down his pen at four, having written for ten hours almost at a stretch, declining all food - for he hated to mix up work with eating and drinking.  Before dressing for dinner he refreshed himself with another bath; but he came to table with a jaded brain and a stomach fasting beyond appetite for food; and the wine was champagne.

Miss Quiney and Ruth Josselin, seated that evening in the drawing-room at Sabines, were startled at eight o’clock or thereabouts by a knocking on the front door.  Miss Quiney looked up from her tambour-work, with hand and needle suspended in mid-air, and gazed across at Ruth, who, seated at the harpsichord, had been singing softly - murmuring rather - the notes of Ben Jonson’s Charis her Triumph -

    “Have you seen but a bright Lillie grow
      Before rude hands have touchd it? -

“Who in the world - at this hour?” demanded Miss Quiney.

A serving-maid ushered in Manasseh.

The tall black halted a little within the doorway, saluted and stood grinning respectfully, his white teeth gleaming in the candle-light.

“Yo’ pardon, ladies.  His Honah sends to say he entertainin’ to-night.  Plenty people drink his Honah’s health an’ long life to Sir Olivah Vyell.  He wish pertick’ly Mis’ Josselin drink it.  He tol’ me run, get out sedan-chair an’ fetch Mis’ Josselin along; fetch her back soon as she likes.  Chairmen at de door dis moment, waitin’.  I mak’ ’em run.”

Ruth stood up.  Her hand went to the edge of her bodice open below the throat.

“Must I?” she asked, turning from Manasseh to Miss Quiney.  Her voice was tense.

“I - I think so, dear,” Miss Quiney answered after a pause.  “It is a command, almost; and to-night naturally Captain Vyell - Sir Oliver - has a claim on our congratulations.”

“You tell me to go? . . .  Oh! but let me be sure you know what you are advising.”  She faced the negro again.  “What guests is Sir Oliver entertaining?”

Manasseh enumerated a dozen.

“All gentlemen!  So, you see!”

“Captain - Sir Oliver (bless me, how I forget! ) has an aversion from ladies’ society - Boston ladies. . . .  It is not for me to criticise, but the distaste is well known.”

“And the gentlemen, Manasseh - they will have taken a great deal of wine by now?”

Manasseh spread out his hands, and again his teeth gleamed.  “To be sho’, Mis’ Josselin; it is not ebery day in the yeah dat Cap’n Vyell become Sir Olivah -

“I did not ask you,” interrupted Ruth coldly, “to excuse your errand. . . .  And now, Tatty dear, do you still bid me to go?”

“On the contrary, I forbid it.”

Ruth stepped close to the little lady.  Said she, standing straight before her and looking down, “It cost you some courage to say that.”

“It may cost me more to-morrow; but I am not afraid.”

“My brave Tatty!  But the courage is thrown away, for I am going.”

“You do not mean this?”

“I do mean it.  My master sends for me.  You know what duty I owe him.”

“He is just.  He will thank you to-morrow that you disobeyed.”

“I shall not disobey.”

Little Miss Quiney, looking up into her ward’s eyes, argued this point no further.  “Very well,” said she.  “Then I go too.”  She closed her mouth firmly, squaring her jaw.

“But in the sedan there is room for one only.”

“Then I go first,” said Miss Quiney, “and the chair shall return for you.  That,” she went on, falling back upon her usual pedantic speech, “presents no difficulty whatever to me.  What I wear does not matter -  the gentlemen will not regard it.  But you must dress in what you have of the best.  It - it will assist you.  Being without experience, you probably have no notion how dress assists one’s self-respect.”

“I think I have some little notion,” Ruth assured her demurely.

“And while the chair is taking me and returning, you will have good time to dress.  On no account are you to hurry. . . .  It is essential that at no point - at no point, dear - you allow yourself to be hurried, or to show any trace of hurry.”

Ruth nodded slowly.  “Yes, Tatty.  I understand.  But, little lioness that you are, do you? You will be alone, and for some time with these - with these -

“I have never mentioned it to a living soul before,” said Miss Quiney, dismissing Manasseh with a wave of the hand and closing the door upon him; “but I had an eldest brother - in the Massachusetts militia - who, not to put too fine a point on it, was sadly addicted to the bottle.  It shortened his days. . . .  A bright young genius, of which we hoped much, and (I fear me) not all unselfishly, for our family was impoverished.  But he went astray.  Towards the end he would bring home his boon companions - I will say this for poor dear George, that his footsteps, at their unsteadiest, ever tended homeward; he never affected low haunts - and it fell to me as the eldest daughter of the house to keep his hospitality within bounds -

“Dear Tatty!” Ruth stooped and kissed the plain little face, cutting short the narrative.  It was strange to note how these two of diverse ages - between whom for the length of their acquaintance no dispute of mastery had arisen - now suddenly and in quick alternation, out of pure love, asserted will against will.  “You shall tell me to-morrow.  (I always knew that your meekness and weakness were only pretence.) But just now we must hurry.”

“Hurry, as I must repeat,” answered Miss Quiney primly, smoothing down the front of her creased grey satin skirt, “is - will be - our capital mistake.  For me, I need in this weather but an additional shawl.  I am ready. . . .  Go to your room . . . and let me enjoin a certain deliberation even in crossing the hall.  Manasseh is there, and before servants - even a negro - The white brocade if I may advise; it is fresher than the rose-coloured silk - and the hair combed a trifle higher off the brows.  That, with the brocade, will correct your girlishness somewhat.  Brocades are for dignity, and it is dignity we chiefly need to-night. . . .  Shall I send Selina to you?  No?  Well, she would be persuading you to some new twist or experiment with your hair, and you are better without her.  Also I shall want a last word with you when I have fetched my cloak, and Selina is better out of the way.”

Miss Quiney’s last word was a curious one.  It took the form of a pearl necklace, her one possession of value, last surviving heirloom of the Quineys, of whom she was the last surviving descendant:  her last tangible evidence, too, of those bygone better days.  She never wore it, and it never saw the light save when she unlocked the worn jewel-case to make sure that her treasure had not been stolen.

She entered Ruth’s room with it furtively.  Despite her injunction against hurry, the girl had already indued the white brocade and stood before the mirror conning herself.  She wore no jewels; she owned none.

“Shut your eyes, dear,” commanded Miss Quiney, and, stealing up behind her, slipped and clasped the necklace about her throat, then fell back, admiring the reflection in the glass.

“Oh, Tatty!”

But Ruth, too, had to pause for a moment to admire.  When she turned, Miss Quiney, forgetting her own injunction, had stolen in haste from the room.

The girl’s eyes moistened.  For a moment she saw herself reflected from the glass in a blur.  Then through the blur the necklace took shape, point by point of light, pearl by pearl, until the whole chain grew definite in the parting of the bodice, resting on the rise of her young bosom.

Yes, and the girl saw that it was good.

A string of words danced upon her brain, as though the mirrored pearls reflected them.

She shall be brought unto the King . . . the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her company.

Chapter V. - SIR OLIVER’S HEALTH.

“De lady is here, yo’ Honah!”

Manasseh announced it from the doorway and stood aside.  Of the company four had already succumbed and slid from their chairs.  The others staggered to their feet, Sir Oliver as promptly as any.  With a face unnaturally white he leaned forward, clutching the edge of the long oval table, and stared between the silver candelabra down the broken ranks of his guests - Mr. Silk, purple of face as his patron was pale; Ned Manley, maundering the tag of a chorus; Captain St. Maur, Captain Goodacre, and Ensign Lumley, British officers captured by the French at Fort Chanseau and released to live at Boston on parole until the war should end; Mr. Fynes, the Collector’s Secretary; Mr. Bythesea, Deputy-Collector; young Shem Hacksteed and young Denzil Baynes, sons of wealthy New Englanders, astray for the while, and sowing their wild oats in a society openly scornful of New England traditions.

Batty Langton’s was the chair nearest the door, and Batty Langton was the one moderately sober man of the company.  He had not heard, in time to interfere, the proposal to send for Ruth:  it had started somewhere at the Collector’s end of the table.  But trifler though he was, he thought it cruel to the girl - a damnable shame - and pulled himself together to prevent what mischief he might.  At the same time he felt curious to see her, curious to learn if these many months of seclusion had fulfilled the Collector’s wager that Ruth Josselin would grow to be the loveliest woman in America.  At Manasseh’s announcement he faced about, and, with a gasp, clutched at the back of his chair.

In the doorway stood little Miss Quiney.  It was so ludicrous a disappointment that for the moment no one found speech.  Langton heard Goodacre, behind him, catch his breath upon a wondering “O - oh!” and felt the shock run down the table along the unsteady ranks.  At the far end a voice - Mr. Silk’s - cackled and burst into unseemly laughter.

Langton swung round.  “Mr. Fynes,” he called sharply, “oblige me, please, by silencing that clergyman - with a napkin in his mouth, if necessary.”

He turned again to Miss Quiney.  “Madam,” he said, offering his arm, “let me lead you to a seat by Sir Oliver.”

The little lady accepted with a curtsy.  A faint flush showed upon either cheek bone, and in her eyes could be read the light of battle.  It commanded his admiration the more that her small arm trembled against his sleeve.  “The courage of it,” he murmured; “and Miss Quiney of all women!”

She needed courage.  The Collector’s handsome face greeted her with a scowl and a hard stare; he could be intractable in his cups.

“Excuse me, madam, but I sent for Miss Josselin.”

She answered him, but first made low obeisance.  “Ruth Josselin will attend, sir, with all despatch.  The sedan is capable of accommodating but one at a time.”

There stood an empty chair on the Collector’s right.  To set it for her Mr. Langton had, as a preliminary, to stoop and drag aside the legs of a reveller procumbent on the floor.  The effort flushed him; but Miss Quiney, with an inclination of the head, slipped into the seat as though she had seen nothing unusual.

“And it gives me the occasion,” she continued respectfully, as her eyes passed over the form of young Manley opposite, who stood with his glass at an angle, spilling its wine on the mahogany, “of expressing - I thank you. . . .  What?  Is it Mr. Silk?  A pleasure, indeed! . . .Yes, I rarely take wine, but on such an occasion as this - an occasion, as I was saying, to felicitate Sir Oliver Vyell on his accession to a title which we, who have served him, best know his capacity to adorn.”

“Oh, damn!” growled the Collector under his breath.

“Half a glassful only!” Miss Quiney entreated, as Mr. Silk poured for her.  She was, in fact, desperately telling herself that if she attempted to lift a full glass, her shaking hand would betray her.

“Yo’ Honah - Mis’ Josselin!”

Mr. Langton had caught the sound of Manasseh’s footfall in the corridor without, and was on the alert before the girl entered.  But at sight of her in the doorway he fell back for a moment.

Yes, the Collector’s promise had come true - and far more than true.  She was marvellous.

It was by mere beauty, too, that she dazzled, helped by no jewels but the one plain rope of pearls at her throat.  She stood there holding herself erect, but not stiffly, with chin slightly lifted; not in scorn, nor yet in defiance, though you were no sooner satisfied of this than a tiniest curve of the nostril set you doubting.  But no; she was neither scornful nor defiant - alert rather, as a fair animal quivering with life, confronting some new experience that for the moment it fails to read.  Or - borrowing her morning’s simile, to convert it - you might liken her to huntress-maiden Diana, surprised upon arrested foot; instep arched, nostril quivering to the unfamiliar, eyes travelling in sudden speculation over a group of satyrs in a glade.  For a certainty that poise of the chin emphasised the head’s perfect carriage; as did the fashion of her head-tire, too - the hair drawn straight above the brows and piled superbly, to break and escape in two careless love-locks on the nape of the neck - in the ripple of each a smile, correcting the goddess to the woman.  The right arm hung almost straight at her side, the hand ready to gather a fold of the white brocaded skirt; the left slanted up to her bosom, where its finger-tips touched the stem of a white rose in the lace at the parting of the bodice. . . .

So she stood - for ten seconds maybe - under the droop of the heavy curtain Manasseh held aside for her.  The hush of the room was homage to her beauty.  Her gaze, passing between the lines of his guests, sought the Collector.  It was fearless, but held a hint of expectancy.  Perhaps she waited for him to leave his place and come forward to receive her.  But he made no motion to do this; not being, in fact, sufficient master of his legs.

“Good-evening, my lord!” She swept him a curtsy.  “You sent for me?”

Before he could answer, she had lowered her eyes.  They rested on a chair that happened to stand empty beside Batty Langton, and a slight inclination of the head gave Langton to understand that she wished him to offer it.  He did so, and she moved to it.  The men, embarrassed for a moment by their host’s silence - they had expected him to answer her, but he stood staring angrily as one rebuffed - followed her cue and reseated themselves.  He, too, dropped back in his chair, leaned forward for the decanter, and poured himself more wine.  The buzz of talk revived, at first a word or two here and there, tentative after the check, then more confidently.  Within a minute the voices were babel again.

Batty Langton pondered.  A baronet should not be addressed as “my lord,” and she had been guilty of a solecism.  At the same time her manner had been perfect; her carriage admirably self-possessed.  Her choice of a seat, too, at the end of the table and furthest from Sir Oliver - if she had come unwillingly - had been wittily taken, and on the moment, and with the appearance of deliberate ease.

“They will be calling on you presently to drink our host’s health,” he suggested, clearing a space of the table in front of her and collecting very dexterously two or three unused wine-glasses.  Champagne? . . .  Miss Quiney is drinking champagne, I see, though her neighbours have deserted it for red wine.  Sir Oliver, by the way, grows lazy in pushing the decanters. . . .  Shall I signal to him?”

“On no account.  Champagne, if you please . . . though I had rather you kept it in readiness.”

“I am sorry, Miss Josselin, but there you ask of me the one thing impossible.  I cannot abide to let wine stand and wait; and champagne -  watch it, how it protests!” He filled her glass and refilled his own.  “By the way,” he added, sinking his voice, “one is permitted to congratulate a debutante?”

“And to criticise.”

“There was nothing to criticise except - Oh, well, a trifle.  At home in England we don’t ‘my lord’ a mere baronet, you know.”

“But since he is my lord?” She smiled gently, answering his puzzled stare.  “How, otherwise, should I be here?”

Mr. Langton took wine to digest this.  He shook his head.  “You must forgive me.  It is clear that I am drunk - abominably drunk - for I miss the point -

“You accuse yourself unjustly.”

“Do I?  Well, I have certainly drunk a deal more wine than is good for me, and it will be revenged to-morrow.  As a rule,” - he glanced around at his fellow-topers - “I pride myself that in head and legs I am inexpugnable.  We all have our gifts; and i’ faith until a moment ago I was patting myself on the back for owning this one.”

“And why, Mr. Langton?”

“On the thought, Mistress Josselin, that I had cut out the frigate, as our tars say, and towed the prize to moorings before the others could fire a gun.”

“I had hoped,” she murmured, and bent her eyes on the wine-bubbles winking against the rim of her glass, “you did it in simple kindness.”

“Well,” he owned slowly, “and so I did.  This belittling of good intentions, small enough to begin with, is a cursed habit, and I’ll renounce it for once.  It was little - it was nothing; yet behold me eager to be thanked.”

“I thank you.”  She fingered the stem of the glass, not lifting her eyes.  “But you have belittled me, too.  I read it in books, and here on the threshold, as I step outside of books, you meet me with it.  We women are always, it seems, poor ships, beating the seas, fleeing capture; and our tackle, our bravery - ” She broke off, and sat musing, while her fingers played with the base of the glass.

“I take back my metaphors, Miss Josselin.  I admit myself no buccaneer, but a simple ass who for once pricked ears on an honest impulse.”

“That is better.  But hush!  Mr. Manley, yonder, is preparing to sing.”

Mr. Manley, a young protege of the Collectors, had a streak of genius as an architect and several lesser gifts, among them a propensity for borrowing and a flexible tenor voice.  He trolled an old song, slightly adapted -

    “Here’s a health unto Sir Oliver,
       With a fal-la-la, lala-la-la;
     Confusion to his enemies,
       With a fa-la-la, lala-la-la;
     And he that will not drink his health,
     I wish him neither wit nor wealth,
     Nor yet a rope to hang himself -
       With a fa-la-la, lala-la-la.”

The effort was applauded.  Above the applause the bull voice of Mr. Silk shouted, -

“But Miss Josselin has not drunk it yet!  Langton monopolises her.  Miss Josselin!  What has Miss Josselin to say?”

The cry was taken up.  “Miss Josselin!  Miss Josselin!”

Batty Langton arose, glass in hand.  “Is it a toast, gentlemen?” He glanced at Sir Oliver, who sat sombre, not lifting his eyes.  “Our host permits me. . . .  Then I give you ‘Miss Josselin!’” Acclamations drowned his voice here, and the men sprang up, waving their glasses.  Sir Oliver stood with the rest.

“Miss Josselin!  Miss Josselin!” they shouted, and drank what their unsteady hands left unspilt.  Langton waited, his full glass half upraised.

“Miss Josselin,” he repeated very deliberately on the tail of the uproar, “who honours this occasion as Sir Oliver’s ward.”

For about five seconds an awkward silence held the company.  Their fuddled memories retained scraps of gossip concerning Ruth, her history and destiny - gossip scandalous in the main.  One or two glanced at the Collector, who had resumed his seat - and his scowl.

“The more reason she should drink his health.”  Again Mr. Silk was fugleman.

His voice braved it off on the silence.  Ruth was raising her glass.  Her eyes sought Miss Quiney’s; but Miss Quiney’s, lifted heavenward, had encountered the ceiling upon which Mr. Manley had recently depicted the hymeneals of Venus and Vulcan, not omitting Mars; and the treatment - a riot of the nude - had for the moment put the redoubtable little lady out of action.

Ruth leaned forward in her seat, lifting her glass high.  It brimmed, but she spilled no drop.

“To Sir Oliver!”

Chapter VI. - CAPTAIN HARRY AND MR. HANMER.

“Guests, has he? - Out of my road, you rascal!  Guests?  I’ll warrant there’s none so welcome -

A good cheery voice - a voice the curtain could not muffle - rang it down the corridor as on the note of a cornet.

The wine was at Ruth’s lip, scarcely wetting it.  She lowered the glass steadily and turned half-about in her chair at the moment when, as before a whirlwind, the curtain flew wide and a stranger burst in on the run with Manasseh at his heels.

“Oliver!” The stranger drew himself up in the doorway - a well-knit figure of a man, clear of eye, bronzed of hue, clad in blue sea-cloth faced with scarlet, and wearing a short sword at the hip.  “Where’s my Oliver?” he shouted.  “You’ll forgive my voice, gentlemen.  I’m Harry Vyell, at your service, fresh from shipboard, and not hoarse with anthems like old what-d’ye-call-him.”  Running his gaze along the table, he sighted the Collector and broke into a view-halloo.

“Oliver!  Brother Noll!” Captain Harry made a second run of it, caught his foot on the prostrate toper whom Langton had dragged out of Miss Quiney’s way, and fell on his brother’s neck.  Recovering himself with a “damn,” he clapped his left hand on Sir Oliver’s shoulder, seized Sir Oliver’s right in his grip and started pump-handling - “as though” murmured Langton, “the room were sinking with ten feet of liquor in the hold.”

“Harry - is it Harry?” Sir Oliver stammered, and made a weak effort to rise.

“Lord!  You’re drunk!” Captain Harry crowed the cheerful discovery.  “Well, and I’ll join you - but in moderation, mind!  Newly married man -  if some one will be good enough to pass the decanter? . . .  My dear fellow! . . .  Cast anchor half an hour ago - got myself rowed ashore hot-foot to shake my Noll by the hand.  Lord, brother, you can’t think how good it feels to be married!  Sally won’t be coming ashore to-night; the hour’s too late, she says; so I’m allowed an hour’s liberty.”  Here the uxorious fellow paused on a laugh, indicating that he found irony in the word.  “But Sally - capital name, Sally, for a sailor’s wife; she’s Sarah to all her family, Sal to me - Sally is cunning.  Sally gives me leave ashore, but on condition I take Hanmer to look after me.  He’s my first lieutenant - first-rate officer, too - but no ladies’ man.  Gad!” chuckled Captain Harry, “I believe he’d run a mile from a petticoat.  But where is he?  Hi, Hanmer! step aft-along here and be introduced!”

A tall grave man, who had entered unnoticed, walked past the line of guests and up to his captain.  He too wore a suit of blue with scarlet facings, and carried a short sword or hanger at his belt.  He stood stiffly, awaiting command.  The candle-light showed, beneath his right cheek bone, the cicatrix of a recent wound.

But Captain Harry, slewing round to him, was for the moment bereft of speech.  His gaze had happened, for the first time, on little Miss Quiney.

“Eh?” he stammered, recovering himself.  “Your pardon, ma’am.  I wasn’t aware that a lady - ” Here his eyes, travelling to the end of the table, were arrested by the vision of Ruth Josselin.  “Wh-e-ew!” he whistled, under his breath.

“Sir Oliver - ” Batty Langton stood up.

“Hey?” The name gave Captain Harry yet another shock.  He spun about again upon his brother. “‘Sir Oliver’? Whats he saying?”

“You’ve not heard?” said the Collector, gripping his words slowly, one by one.  “No, of course you’ve not.  Harry, our uncle is dead.”

There was a pause.  “Poor old boy!” he muttered.  “Used to be kind to us, Noll, after his lights.  If it hadn’t been for his womenkind.”

“They’re coming across to visit me, damn ’em!”

“What?  Aunt Carrie and Di’? . . .  Good Lord!”

“They’re on the seas at this moment - may be here within the week.”

“Good Lord!” Captain Harry repeated, and his eyes wandered again to Ruth
Josselin.  “Awkward, hey? . . .  But I say, Noll - you really are Sir
Oliver!  Dear lad, I give you joy, and with all my heart. . . . 
Gad, here’s a piece of news for Sally!”

Again he came to a doubtful halt, and again with his eyes on Ruth Josselin.  He was not a quick-witted man, outside of his calling, nor a man apt to think evil; but he had been married a month, and this had been long enough to teach him that women and men judge by different standards.

“Sir Oliver,” repeated Langton, “Miss Josselin craves your leave to retire.”

“Yes, dear” - Miss Quiney launched an approving nod towards her - “I was about to suggest it, with Sir Oliver’s leave.  The hour is late, and by the time the sedan-chair returns for me -

“There is no reason, Tatty, why we should not return together,” said Ruth quietly.  “The night is fine; and, with Manasseh for escort, I can walk beside your chair.”

“Pardon me, ladies,” put in Mr. Silk.  “Once in the upper town, you may be safe enough; but down here by the quay the sh - sailors - I know ’em -  it’s my buishness.  ’Low me - join the eshcort.”

But here, perceived by few in the room, a somewhat remarkable thing happened.  Mr. Hanmer, who had stood hitherto like a statue, put out a hand and laid it on Mr. Silk’s shoulder; and there must have been some power in that grip, for Mr. Silk dropped into his seat without another word.

Captain Harry saw it, and broke into a laugh.

“Why, to be sure!  Hanmer’s the very man!  The rest of ye too drunk -  meaning no offence; and, for me, - well, for me, you see there’s Sally to be reckoned with.”  He laughed aloud at this simple jocularity.  “Hanmer!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Convoy.”

“If you wish it, sir.”  The lieutenant bowed stiffly; but it was to be noted that the scar, which had hitherto showed white on a bronzed cheek, now reddened on a pale one.

Miss Quiney hesitated.  “The gentleman, as a stranger to Boston -

“I’ll answer for Hanmer, ma’am.  You’ll get little talk out of him; but, be there lions at large in Boston, Jack Hanmer’ll lead you past ’em.”

“Like Mr. Greatheart in the parable,” spoke up Ruth, whose eyes had been taking stock of the proposed escort, though he stood in the penumbra and at half the room’s length away.  “Tatty - if my lord permit and Lieutenant Hanmer be willing -

She stood up, and with a curtsy to Sir Oliver, swept to the door.  Miss Quiney pattered after; and Mr. Hanmer, with a bow and hand lifted to the salute, stalked out at their heels.

“I’ll warrant Jack Hanmer ’d liefer walk up to a gun,” swore Captain Harry as the curtain fell behind them.  “He bolts from the sight of Sally.  I’ll make Sally laugh over this.”  But here he pulled himself up and added beneath his voice, “I can’t tell her, though.”

The road as it climbed above the town toward Sabines grew rough and full of pitfalls.  Even by the light of the full moon shining between the elms Miss Quiney’s chairmen were forced to pick their way warily, so that the couple on the side-walk - which in comparison was well paved -  easily kept abreast of them.

Ruth walked with the free grace of a Dryad.  The moonlight shone now and again on her face beneath the arch of her wimple; and once, as she glanced up at the heavens, Mr. Hanmer - interpreting that she lifted her head to a scent of danger, and shooting a sidelong look despite himself - surprised a lustre as of tears in her eyes; whereupon he felt ashamed, as one who had intruded on a secret.

“Mr. Hanmer.”

“Ma’am?”

“I have a favour to beg. . . .  Is it true, by the way,” she asked mischievously, “that to talk with a woman distresses you?”

“Ma’am -

“My name is Ruth Josselin.”

Mr. Hanmer either missed to hear the correction or heard and put it aside.  “Been at sea all my life,” he explained.  “They caught me young.”

Ruth looked sideways at him and laughed - a liquid little laugh, much like the bubbling note of a thrush.  “You could not have given an answer more pat, sir.  I want to speak to you about a child, caught young and about to be taken to sea.  You are less shy with children, I hope?”

“Not a bit,” confessed Mr. Hanmer.  He added, “They take to me, though -  the few I’ve met.

“Dick will take to you, for certain.  Dicky is Sir Oliver’s child.”

“I didn’t know - ” Mr. Hanmer came to a full stop.

“No,” said Ruth, as though she echoed him.  “He is eight years old almost.”  Her eyes looked straight ahead, but she was aware that his had scanned her face for a moment, and almost she felt his start of reassurance.

“So, the child being a friend of mine, and his father having promised him a cruise in the Venus, you see that I very much want to know what manner of lady is Captain Harry’s wife; and that I could not ask you point-blank because you would have set the question down to idle curiosity. . . .  It might make all the difference to him,” she added, getting no answer.

“A child of eight, and the country at war!” Mr. Hanmer muttered.  “His father must know that we cruise ready for action.”

“I tell you, sir, what Dicky told me this morning.”

“But it’s impossible!”

“To that, sir, I might find you half a dozen answers.  To begin with, we all know - and Sir Oliver perhaps, from private information, knows better than any of us - that peace is in sight.  Here in the northern Colonies it has arrived already; the enemy has no fleet on this side of the world, and on this coast no single ship to give you any concern.”

“Guarda-costas?  There may be a few left on the prowl, even in these latitudes.  I don’t believe it for my part; we’ve accounted for most of ’em.  Still -

“And Captain Harry thinks so much of them that he sails from Carolina to Boston with his bride on board!”

“You are right, Miss Josselin, and you are wrong. . . .  Mistress Vyell has come to Boston in the Venus; and by reason that her husband, when he started, had as little acquaintance with fear for others as for himself.  But if she return to Carolina it will be by land or when peace is signed.  Love has made the Captain think; and thought has made him -  well, with madam on board, I am thankful - ” He checked himself.

“You are thankful he did not sight a guarda-costa.”  She concluded the sentence for him, and walked some way in silence, while he at her side was silent, being angry at having said so much.

“Yet Captain Harry is recklessly brave?” she mused.

“To the last degree, Miss Josselin,” Mr. Hanmer agreed eagerly.  “To the last degree within the right military rules.  Fighting a ship’s an art, you see.”

It seemed that she did not hear him.  “It runs in the blood,” she said.  She was thinking, fearfully yet exultantly, of this wonderful power of women, for whose sake cowards will behave as heroes and heroes turn to cowards.

They had outstripped the chairmen, and were at the gate of Sabines.  He held it open for her.  She bethought her that his last two or three sentences had been firmly spoken, that his voice had shaken off its husky stammer, and on the impulse of realised power she took a fancy to hear it tremble again.

“But if madam will not be on board to look after Dicky, the more will he need a friend.  Mr. Hanmer, will you be that friend?”

“You are choosing a rough sort of nurse-maid.”

“But will you?” She faced him, wonderful in the moonlight.

His eyes dropped.  His voice stammered, “I - I will do my best, Miss Josselin.”

She held out a hand.  He took it perforce in his rope-roughened paw, held it awkwardly for a moment, and released it as one lets a bird escape.

Ruth smiled.  “The best of women,” ran a saying of Batty Langton’s, “if you watch ’em, are always practising; even the youngest, as a kitten plays with a leaf.”

They stood in silence, waiting for the chair to overtake them.

“Tatty, you are a heroine!”

Miss Quiney, unwinding a shawl from her head under the hall-lamp, released herself from Ruth’s embrace.  Her nerve had been strained and needed a recoil.

“Maybe,” she answered snappishly.  “For my part, I’d take more comfort, just now, to be called a respectable woman.”

Ruth laughed, kissed her again, and stood listening to the footsteps as they retreated down the gravelled way.  Among them her ear distinguished easily the firm tread of Mr. Hanmer.

Chapter VII. - FIRST OFFER.

A little before noon next day word came to her room that Sir Oliver had called and desired to speak with her.

She was not unprepared.  She had indeed dressed with special care in the hope of it; but she went to her glass and stood for a minute or two, touching here and there her seemly tresses.

Should she keep him waiting - keep him even a long while? . . .  He deserved it. . . .  But ah, no!  She was under a vow never to be other than forthright with him; and the truth was, his coming filled her with joy.

“I am glad you have come!” These, in fact, were her first words as he turned to face her in the drawing-room.  He had been standing by the broad window-seat, staring out on the roses.

“You guess, of course, what has brought me?” He had dressed himself with extreme care.  His voice was steady, his eye clear, and only a touch of pallor told of the overnight debauch.  “I am here to be forgiven.”

“Who am I, to forgive?”

“If you say that, you make it three times worse for me.  Whatever you are does not touch my right to ask your pardon, or my need to be forgiven - which is absolute.”

“No,” she mused, “you are right. . . .  Have you asked pardon of Tatty?”

“I have, ten minutes ago.  She sent the message to you.”

“Tatty was heroic” - Ruth paused on the reminiscence with a smile - ” and, if you will believe me, quite waspish when I told her so.”

“You should have refused to come.  You might have known that I was drunk, or I could never have sent.”

“How does it go?” She stood before him, puckering her brows a little as she searched to remember the words - “’On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded the seven chamberlains - ’”

“Spare me.”

- to bring Vasbti the queen before the king with the crown royal, to show the people and the princes her beauty, for she was fair to look on.’  Do I quote immodestly, my lord?”

“Not immodestly,” he answered.  “For I think - I’ll be sworn - no woman ever had half your beauty without knowing it.  But you quote mal a propos.  Queen Vashti refused to come.”

“‘Therefore was the king very wroth, and his anger burned in him.’”

“I think, again, that you were not the woman to obey any such fear.”

No.  Queen Vashti refused to come, being a queen.  Whereas I, my lord -

    “’Being your slave, what should I do but tend
      Upon the hours and times of your desire?’”

“My slave?” he asked.  “Setting aside last night - when I was disgustingly drunk - have you a single excuse for using that word?”

“Of your giving, none.  You have been more than considerate.  Of my own choosing, yes.”

He stared.

“At any rate Tatty is not your slave,” she went on, and he smiled with her.  “I am glad you asked Tatty’s pardon.  Did she forgive you easily?”

“Too easily.  She was aware, she said, that gentlemen would be gentlemen.”

“She must have meant precisely the reverse.”

“Was I pretty bad?”

She put a hand across her eyes as if to brush the image from them.  “What matters the degree?  It was another man seated and wearing my lord’s body. That hurt.”

“By God, Ruth, it shall never happen again!”

She winced as he spoke her name, and her colour rose.  “Please make no promise in haste,” she said.

“Excuse me; when a man takes an oath for life, the quicker he’s through with it the better - at least that’s the way with us Vyells.  It’s trifles - like getting drunk, for instance - we do deliberately.  Believe me, child, I have a will of my own.”

“Yes,” she meditated, “I believe you have a strong will.”

“’Tis a swinish business, over-drinking, when all’s said and done.”  He announced it as if he made a discovery; and indeed something of a discovery it was, for that age.  “Weakens a man’s self-control, besides dulling his palate. . . .  They tell me, by the way, that after you left I beat Silk.”

Ruth looked grave.  “You did wrong, then.”

“Silk is a beast.”

“An excellent reason for not making him your guest; none for striking him at your own table.”

“Perhaps not.”  Sir Oliver shrugged his shoulders.  “Well, he can have his revenge, if he wants it.”

“How so?  As a clergyman he cannot offer to fight you, and as a coward he would not if he could.”

“Is one, then, to be considerate with cowards?”

“Certainly, if you honour cowards with your friendship.”

“Friendship! . . .  The dog likes his platter and I suffer him for his talk.  When his talk trespasses beyond sufferance, I chastise him.  That’s how I look at it.”

“I am sorry, my lord, that Mr. Silk should make the third on your list this morning.”

“Oh, come; you don’t ask me to apologise to Silk!”

“To him rather than to me.”

“But - oh nonsense!  He was disgusting - unspeakable, I tell you.  If you suppose I struck him for nothing -

“I do not.”

“You cannot think what he said.”

“Something about me, was it not?” Then, as Sir Oliver stood silent, “Something a great many folk - your guests included - are quite capable of thinking about me, though they have not Mr. Silk’s gift of language.”

“ - That gift for which (you will go on to remind me) I suffer him.”

“No; that gift which (you said) trespasses beyond sufferance.”  She did not remind him that he, after all, had exposed her and provoked Mr. Silk’s uncleanly words.

Both were beating time now.  He had come, as was meet, to offer an apology, and with no intent beyond.  He found not only that Ruth Josselin was grown a woman surpassing fair, but that her mere presence (it seemed, by no will of hers, but in spite of her will) laid hold of him, commanding him to face a further intent.  It was wonderful, and yet just at this moment it mattered little, that the daylight soberly confirmed what had dazzled his drunkenness over night; that her speech added good sense to beauty. . . .  What mattered at the moment was a sense of urgency, oppressing and oppressed by an equal sense of helplessness.

He had set the forces working and, with that, had chosen to stand aside - in indolence partly, partly in a careful cultivated indifference, but in part also obeying motives more creditable.  He had stood aside, promising the result, but himself dallying with time.  And lo! of a sudden the result had overtaken him.  Had he created a monster, in place of a beautiful woman, he had not been more at its mercy.

But why this sense of urgency?  And why should he allow it to oppress him?

Here was a creature exquisite, desirable, educated for no purpose but to be his.  Then why not declare himself, leap the last easy fence and in a short while make her his?

To be sure her education - which, as we have seen, owned one source and spring, the passion to make herself perfect for his sake - had fashioned a woman very different to the woman of his planning.  She had built not upon his careless defective design but upon her own incessant instinct for the best.  So much his last night’s blunder had taught him.  He had sent for her as for a handmaid; and as a handmaid she had obeyed - but in spirit as a queen.

To put it brutally, she could raise her terms, and he as a gentleman could not beat her down.  With ninety-nine women out of a hundred those higher terms could be summed up in one word - marriage.  Well and again, why not?  He was rich and his own master.  In all but her poor origin and the scandal of an undeserved punishment she was worthy - more than worthy; and for the Colonials, among whom alone that scandal would count against her, he had a habit of contempt.  He could, and would in his humour, force Boston to court her salons and hold its tongue from all but secret tattle.  The thought, too, of Lady Caroline at this moment crossing the high seas to be met with the news agreeably moved him to mirth.

But somehow, face to face here, he divined that Ruth was not as ninety-nine women in the hundred; that her terms were different.  They might he less, but also they were more.  They might be less.  Had she not crossed her arms and told him she was his slave?  But in that very humility he read that they were more.  There was no last easy fence.  There was no fence at all.  But a veil there was; a veil he lacked the insight to penetrate, the brutality to tear aside.

Partly to assure himself, partly to tempt her from this mysterious ring of defence, he went on, “I ought to apologise, too, for having sent Silk yesterday with my message.  You received it?”

She bent her head.

“My aunt and cousin invite themselves to Boston, and give me no chance to say anything but ‘Welcome.’  Two pistols held to my head.”  He laughed.  “There’s a certain downrightness in Lady Caroline.  And what do you suppose she wants?”

“Mr. Silk says she wants you to marry your cousin.”

“Told you that, did he?” His eyes were on her face, but it had not changed colour; her clear gaze yet baffled him.  “Well, and what do you say?”

“Must I say anything?”

“Well” - he gave a short, impatient laugh - “we can hardly pretend - can we? - that it doesn’t concern you.”

“I do not pretend it,” she answered.  “I am yours, to deal with as you will; to dismiss when you choose.  I can never owe you anything but gratitude.”

“Ruth, will you marry me?”

He said it with the accent of passion, stepping half a pace forward, holding out his hands.  She winced and drew back a little; she, too, holding out her hands, but with the palms turned downward.  Upon that movement his passion hung fire. (Was it actual passion, or rather a surrender to the inevitable - to a feeling that it had all happened fatally, beyond escape, that now - beautiful, wonderful as she had grown - he could never do without her?  At any rate their hands, outstretched thus, did not meet.)

“You talked lightly just now,” she said, and with the smallest catch in her voice, “of vows made in haste.  You forget your vow that after three years I should go back - go back whence you took me - and choose.”

“No,” he corrected.  “My promise was that you should go back and announce your choice.  If some few months are to run, nothing hinders your choosing here and now.  I do not ask you to marry me before the term is out, but only to make up your mind.  You hear what I offer?”

She swept him a low, obedient bow.  “I do, and it is much to me, my dear lord.  Oh, believe me, it is very much! . . .  But I do not think I want to be your wife - thus.”

“You could not love me?  Is that what you mean?”

“Not love you?” Her voice, sweet and low, choked on the words.  “Not love you?” she managed to repeat.  “You, who came to me as a god -  to me, a poor tavern drudge - who lifted me from the cart, the scourge; lifted me out of ignorance, out of shame?  Lord - love - doubt what you will of me - but not that!”

“You do love me?  Then why - ” He paused, wondering.  The impalpable barrier hung like a mist about his wits.

“Did Andromeda not love Perseus, think you?” she asked lightly, recovering her smile, albeit her eyes were dewy.

“I am dull, then,” he confessed.  “I certainly do not understand.”

“You came to me as a god when you saved me.  Shall you come to me as less by an inch when you stoop to love me?”

“Ah!” he said, as if at length he comprehended; “I was drunk last night, and you must have time to get that image out of your mind.”

She shook her head slowly.  “You did not ask me last night to marry you.  I shall always, I think, be able to separate an unworthy image of you, and forget it.”

“Then you must mean that I am yet unworthy.”

“My dear lord,” she said after a moment or two, in which she seemed to consider how best to make it plain to him, “you asked me just now to marry you, but not because you knew me to be worthy; and though you may command what you choose, and I can deny you nothing, I would not willingly be your wife for a smaller reason.  Nor did you ask me in the strength of your will, your passion even, but in their weakness.  Am I not right?”

He was dumb.

“And is it thus,” she went on, “that the great ones love and beget noble children?”

“I see,” he said at length, and very slowly.  “It means that I must very humbly become your wooer.”

“It means that, if it be my honour ever to reward you, I would fain it were with the best of me. . . .  Send me away from Sabines, my lord, and be in no hurry to choose.  Your cousin - what is her name?  Oh, I shall not be jealous!”

With a change of tone she led him to talk of the new home he had prepared for her - at a farmstead under Wachusett.  He was sending thither two of his gentlest thoroughbreds, that she might learn to ride.

“Books, too, you shall have in plenty,” he promised.  “But there will be a dearth of tutors, I fear.  I could not, for example, very well ask Mr. Hichens to leave his cure of souls and dwell with two maiden ladies in the wilderness.”

She laughed.  Her eyes sparkled already at the thought of learning to be a horsewoman.

“I will do without tutors.”  She spread her arms wide, as with a swimmer’s motion, and he could not but note the grace of it.  The palms, turned outward and slightly downward, had an eloquence, too, which he interpreted.

“I have mewed you here too long.  You sigh for liberty.”

She nodded, drawing a long breath.  “I come from the sea-beach, remember.”

“Say but the word, and instead of the mountain, the beach shall be yours.”

“No.  I have never seen a mountain.  It will have the sound of waters, too - of its own cataracts.  And on the plain I shall learn to gallop, and feel the wind rushing past me.  These things, and a few books, and Tatty - ” Here she broke off, on a sudden thought.  “My lord, there is a question I have put to myself many times, and have promised myself to put to you.  Why does Tatty never talk to me about God and religion and such things?”

He did not answer at once.

She went on:  “It cannot only be because you do not believe in them.  For Tatty is very religious, and brave as a lion; she would never be silent against her conscience.”

“How do you know that I don’t believe in them?”

She laughed.  “Does my lord truly suppose me so dull of wit? or will he fence with my question instead of answering it?”

“The truth is, then,” he confessed, “that before she saw you I thought fit to tell Miss Quiney what you had suffered -

“She has known it from the first?  I wondered sometimes.  But oh, the dear deceit of her!”

“ - And seeing that this same religion had caused your sufferings, I asked her to deal gently with you.  She would not promise more than to wait and choose her own time.  But Tatty, as you call her, is an honourable woman.”

Ruth stretched out her hands.

“Ah, you were good - you were good! . . .  If only my heart were a glass, and you might see how goodness becomes you!”

He took her hands this time, and laying one over another, kissed the back of the uppermost, but yet so respectfully that Miss Quiney, entering the room just then, supposed him to be merely taking a ceremonious leave.

For a few minutes he lingered out his call, hat and walking-cane in hand, talking pleasantly of his last night’s guests, and with a smile that assumed his pardon to be granted.  Incidentally Ruth learned how it had happened that a chair stood empty for her by Mr. Langton’s side.  It appeared that Governor Shirley himself had called, earlier in the evening, to offer his félicitations; and finding the seat on Sir Oliver’s right occupied by a toper who either would not or could not make room, he had with some tact taken a chair at the far end of the table and vis-a-vis with his host, protesting that he chose it as the better vantage-ground for delivering a small speech.  His speech, too, had been neat, happy in phrase, and not devoid of good feeling.  Having delivered it, he had slipped away early, on an excuse of official business.

Sir Oliver related this appreciatively; and it had, in fact, been one of those small courtesies which, among men of English stock, give a grace to public life and help to keep the fighting clean.  But in fact also (Ruth gathered) the two men did not love one another.  Shirley - able and ruse statesman - had some sense of colonial independence, colonial ambition, colonial self-respect.  Sir Oliver had none; he was a Whig patrician, and the colonies existed for the use and patronage of England.  More than a year before, when Massachusetts raised a militia and went forth to capture Louisbourg - which it did, to the astonishment of the world - the Governor, whose heart was set on the expedition, had approached Captain Vyell and privately begged him to command it.  He was answered that, having once borne the King’s commission, Captain Vyell did not find a colonial uniform to his taste.

Chapter VIII. - CONCERNING MARGARET.

He called again, next morning.  He came on horseback, followed by a groom.  The groom led a light chestnut mare, delicate of step us a dancer, and carrying a side-saddle.

Ruth’s ear had caught the sound of hoofs.  She looked forth at her open window as Sir Oliver reined up and hailed, frank as a schoolboy.

“Your first riding lesson!” he announced.

“But I have no riding-skirt,” she objected, her eyes opening wide with delight as they looked down and scanned the mare.

“You shall have one to-morrow.”  He swung himself out of saddle and gave over his own horse to the groom.  “To-day you have only to learn how to sit and hold the reins and ride at a walk.”

She caught up a hat and ran downstairs, blithe as a girl should be blithe.

He taught her to set her foot in his hand and lifted her into place.

“But are you not riding also?” she asked as he took the leading-rein.

“No.  I shall walk beside you to-day . . .  Now take up the reins - so; in both hands, please.  That will help you to sit square and keep the right shoulder back, which with a woman is half the secret of a good seat.  Where a man uses grip, she uses balance. . . .  For the same reason you must not draw the feet back; it throws your body forward and off its true poise on the hips.”

She began to learn at once and intelligently; for, unlike her other tutors, he started with simple principles and taught her nothing without giving its reason.  He led her twice around the open gravelled space before the house, and so aside and along a grassy pathway that curved between the elms to the right.  The pathway was broad and allowed him to walk somewhat wide of the mare, yet not so wide as to tauten the leading-rein, which he held (as she learned afterwards) merely to give her confidence; for the mare was docile and would follow him at a word.

“I am telling you the why-and-how of it all,” he said, “because after this week you will be teaching yourself.  This week I shall come every morning for an hour; but on Wednesday you start for Sweetwater Farm.”

“And will there be nobody at the Farm to help me,” she asked, a trifle dismayed.

“The farmer - his name is Cordery - rides, after a fashion.  But he knows nothing of a side-saddle, if indeed he has ever seen one.”

“Then to trot, canter, and gallop I must teach myself,” she thought; for among the close plantations of Sabines there was room for neither.  “If I experiment here, they will find me hanging like Absalom from a bough.”  But aloud she said nothing of her tremors.

“Dicky sits a horse remarkably well for his age,” said Sir Oliver after a pause.  “I had some thought to pack him off holidaying with you.  But the puppy has taken to the water like a spaniel.  He went off to the Venus yesterday, and it seems that on board of her he struck up, there and then, a close friendship with Harry’s lieutenant, a Mr. Hanmer; and now he can talk of nothing but rigging and running-gear.  He’s crazed for a cruise and a hammock.  Also it would seem that he used his time to win the affections of Madam Harry; which argues that his true calling is not the Navy, after all, but diplomacy.”

Ruth sighed inaudibly.  Dicky’s companionship would have been delightful.  But she knew the child’s craze, and would not claim him, to mar his bliss - though she well knew that at a word from her he would renounce it.

“Diplomacy?” she echoed.

“Well,” said Sir Oliver, looking straight before him.  “Sally - my brother insists on calling her Sally - appears to have her head fixed well on her shoulders:  she looks - as you must not forget to look -  straight between the horse’s ears.  But your young bride is apt to be the greatest prude in the world.  And Dicky, you see -

Her hand weighed on the rein and brought the mare to a halt.

“Tell me about Dicky?”

“About Dicky?” he repeated.

“About his mother, then.”

“She is dead,” he answered, staring at the mare’s glossy shoulder and smoothing it.  His brows were bent in a frown.

“Yes . . . he told me that, in the coach, on our way from Port Nassau.  It was the first thing he told me when he awoke.  We had been rolling along the beach for hours in the dark; and I remember how, almost at the end of the beach, it grew light inside the coach and he opened his eyes. . . .”

She did not relate that the child had awaked in her arms.

“It was the first thing Dicky told me,” she repeated; “and the only thing about - her.  I think it must be the only thing he knows about her.”

“Probably; for she died when he was born and - well, as the child grew up, it was not easy to explain to him.  Other folks, no doubt - the servants and suchlike - were either afraid to tell or left it to me as my business.  And I am an indolent parent.”  He paused and added, “To be quite honest, I dare say I distasted the job and shirked it.”

“You did wrongly then,” murmured Ruth, and her eyes were moist.  “Dicky started with a great hole in his life, and you left it unfilled.  Often, being lonely, he must have needed to know something of his mother.  You should have told him all that was good; and that was not little, I think, if you had loved her?”

“I loved her to folly,” he answered at length, his eyes still fixed on the mare’s shoulder; “and yet not to folly, for she was a good woman:  a married woman, some three or four years older than I and close upon twenty years younger than her husband, who was major of my regiment.”

“You ran away with her? . . .  Say that he was not your friend.”

“He was not; and you may put it more correctly that I helped her to run away from him.  He was a drunkard, and in private he ill-used her disgustingly. . . .  Having helped her to escape I offered him his satisfaction.  He refused to divorce her; but we fought and I ran him through the arm to avoid running him through the body, for he was a shockingly bad swordsman.”

Ruth frowned.  “You could not marry her?”

“No, and to kill him was no remedy; for if I could not marry an undivorced woman, as little could she have married her husband’s murderer.”  He hunched his shoulders and concluded, “The dilemma is not unusual.”

“What happened, then?”

“My mother paid twenty calls upon the Duke of Newcastle, and after the twentieth I received the Collectorship of this port of Boston.  It was exile, but lucrative exile.  My good mother is a Whig and devout; and there is nothing like that combination for making the best of both worlds.  Indeed you may say that at this point she added the New World, and made the best of all three.  She assured me that its solitudes would offer, among other advantages, great opportunity for repentance.  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘if you must take the woman, you must.’”

He ended with a short laugh.  Ruth did not laugh.  Her mind was masculine at many points, but like a true woman she detested ironical speech.

“That is Mr. Langton’s way of talking,” she said; “and you are using it to hide your feelings.  Will you tell me her name? - her Christian name only?”

“She was called Margaret - Margaret Dance.  There is no reason why you should not have it in full.”

“Is there a portrait of her?”

“Yes; as a girl she sat to Kneller - a Dryad leaning against an oak.  The picture hangs in my dressing-room.”

“It should have hung, rather, in Dicky’s nursery; which,” she added, picking up and using the weapon she most disliked, “need not have debarred your seeing it from time to time.”

He glanced up, for he had never before heard her speak thus sharply.

“Perhaps you are right,” he agreed; “though, for me, I let the dead bury the dead.  I have no belief, remember, in any life beyond this one.  Margaret is gone, and I see not how, being dead, she can advantage me or Dicky.”

His words angered Ruth and at the same time subtly pleased her; and on second thoughts angered her the more for having pleased.  She thought scorn of herself for her momentary jealousy of the dead; scorn for having felt relief at his careless tone; and some scorn to be soothed by a doctrine that, in her heart, she knew to be false.

For the moment her passions were like clouds in thunder weather, mounting against the wind; and in the small tumult of them she let jealousy dart its last lightning tongue.

“I am not learned in these matters, my lord.  But I have heard that man must make a deity of something.  The worse sort of unbeliever, they say, lives in the present and burns incense to himself.  The better sort, having no future to believe in, idolises his past.”

“Margaret is dead,” he repeated.  “I am no sentimentalist.”

She bent her head.  To herself she whispered.  “He may not idolise his past, yet he cannot escape from it.” . . .  And her thoughts might have travelled farther, but she had put the mare to a walk again and just then her ears caught an unaccustomed sound, or confusion of sounds.

At the end of the alley she reined up, wide-eyed.

A narrow gateway here gave access to what had yesterday been a sloping paddock where Miss Quiney grazed a couple of cows.  To-day the cows had vanished and given way to a small army of labourers.  Broad strips of turf had vanished also and the brown loam was moving downhill in scores of wheel-barrows, to build up the slope to a level.

Sir Oliver marked her amazement and answered it with an easy laugh.

“The time is short, you see, and already we have wasted half an hour of it unprofitably. . . .  These fellows appear to be working well.”

She gazed at the moving gangs as one who, having come by surprise upon a hive of bees, stands still and cons the small creatures at work.

“But what is the meaning of it?”

“The meaning?  Why, that for this week I am your riding-master, and that by to-morrow you will have a passable riding-school.”

Chapter IX. - THE PROSPECT.

This happened on a Thursday.  On the following Wednesday, a while before day-break, he met her on horseback by the gate of Sabines, and they rode forth side by side, ahead of the coach wherein Miss Quiney sat piled about with baggage, clutching in one hand a copy of Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest and with the other the ring of a canary-cage. (It was Dicky’s canary, and his first love-offering.  Yesterday had been Ruth’s birthday - her eighteenth - and under conduct of Manasseh he had visited Sabines to wish her “many happy returns” and to say good-bye.)

Sir Oliver would escort the travellers for twelve miles on their way, to a point where the inland road broke into cart-tracks, and the tracks diverged across a country newly disafforested and strewn with jagged stumps among which the heavy vehicle could by no means be hauled.  Here Farmer Cordery was to be in waiting with his light tilt-covered wagon.

They had started thus early because the season was hot and they desired to traverse the open highway and the clearings and to reach the forest before the sun’s rays grew ardent.  Once past the elms of Sabines their road lay broad before them, easy to discern; for the moon, well in her third quarter, rode high, with no trace of cloud or mist.  So clear she shone that in imagination one could reach up and run a finger along her hard bright edge; and under moon and stars a land-breeze, virginally cool, played on our two riders cheeks.  Ungloving and stretching forth a hand, Ruth felt the dew falling, as it had been falling ever since sundown; and under that quiet lustration the world at her feet and around her, unseen as yet, had been renewed, the bee-ravished flowers replaced with blossoms ready to unfold, the turf revived, reclothed in young green, the atmosphere bathed, cleansed of exhausted scents, made ready for mornings bridal of the earth and sky : -

“As a vesture shall he fold them up. . . .  In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun; which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.”

Darkling they rode, and in silence, as though by consent.  Ruth had never travelled this high way before:  it glimmered across a country of which she knew nothing and could see nothing.  But no shadow of fear crossed her spirit.  Her heart was hushed; yet it exulted, because her lord rode beside her.

They had ridden thus without speech for three or four miles, when her chestnut blundered, tripped, and was almost down.

“All right?” he asked, as she reined up and steadied the mare.

“Yes. . . .  She gave me a small fright, though.”

“What happened?  It looked to me as if she came precious near crossing her feet.  If she repeats that trick by daylight I’ll cast her - as I would to-morrow, if I were sure.”

“Is it so bad a trick?”

“It might break your neck.  It would certainly bring her down and break her knees.”

“Oh!” Ruth shivered.  “Do you mean that it would actually break them?” she asked in her ignorance.

He laughed.  “Well, that’s possible; but I meant the skin of the knee.”

“That would heal, surely?”

He laughed again.  “A horse is like a woman - ” he began, but checked himself of a sudden.  She waited for him to continue, and he went on, “It knocks everything off the price, you see.  Some won’t own a horse that has once been down; and any knowledgeable man can tell, at a glance.  It is the first thing he looks for.”

She considered for a moment.  “But if the mark had been a scratch only -  and the scratch had healed - might she not be as good a horse as ever?”

“It would damage her price, none the less.”

“But you are not a horse-dealer.  Would you value a horse by its selling price?”

He laughed.  “I am afraid,” he owned, “that I should be ruled by other men’s opinions.  Your connoisseur does not collect chipped chinaware. . . .  There’s the chance, too, that the mare, having once fallen, will throw herself again by the same trick.”

“And women are like horses,” thought Ruth as they rode on.  The night was paling about them, and she watched the rolling champaign as little by little it took shape, emerging from the morning mist and passing from monochrome into faint colours:  for albeit the upper sky was clear as ever, mist filled the hollows of the hills and rolled up their sides like a smoke.

“Look!” commanded Sir Oliver, reining up and turning in his saddle.

He pointed with his horse-whip.  Behind them, over a tree-clad hill, lay a long purple cloud; and above it, while he pointed, the sun thrust its edge as it were the rim of a golden paten.  Ruth wheeled her mare about, to face the spectacle, and at that moment the cloud parted horizontally as though a hand had ripped the veil across.  A flood of gold poured through the rent, dazzling her eyes.

The sun mounted and swam free:  the upper portion of the veil floated off like a wisp and drifted down the wind.  Where the glory had shone, it lingered through tint after tint - rose, pale lemon, palest sea-green -  and so passed into azure and became one with the rest of the heavens.

Sir Oliver withdrew his eyes and sought hers.  “When I find the need of faith,” he said, “I shall turn sun-worshipper.”

“You have never found that need?” she asked slowly.

“Never,” he confessed.  “And you?”

“Never as a need.  I mean,” she explained, “that though I always despised religion - yes, always, even before I came to hate it - I never doubted that some wisdom must be at watch and at work all around me, ordering the sun and stars, for instance, and separating right from wrong.  I just cannot understand how any one can do without a faith of that sort:  it’s as necessary as breath.”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “To me one Jehovah’s as good as another, as unnecessary, and as incredible.  I find it easier to believe that chaos hurtled around until it struck out some working balance; that the stars learned their places pretty much as men and women are learning theirs to-day.  A painful process, I’ll grant you, and damnably tedious; but they came to it in the end, and so in the end, maybe, will poor imitative man.  But,” he broke off, “this faith of yours must have failed you, once.”

She shivered.  “No; I made no claim on it, you see.  Perhaps” - with a little smile - “I did not think myself important enough.  I only know that, whatever was right, those men were horribly wrong:  for it must be wrong to be cruel.  Then I woke up, and you were beside me -

She would have added, “How could I doubt, then?” But her voice failed her, and she wheeled about that he might not see her tears.

He, too, turned his horse.  They rode on for a few paces in silence.

“I wish,” she said, recovering her voice - “I wish, for your sake, you could have felt what I have been feeling since we left Sabines; the goodness all about us, watching us out of the night and the stars.”

She looked up; but the stars were gone, faded out into daylight.  He pushed his horse half a pace ahead, and glanced sideways at her face.  Tears shone yet in her eyes, and his own, as he quickly averted them, fell on a tall mullein growing by the roadside.  Big drops of dew adhered upon its woolly leaves and twinkled in the sunshine; and by contrast he knew the colour of her eyes - that they were violet and of the night - their dew distilled out of such violet darkness as had been the quality of one or two Mediterranean nights that lingered among his memories of the Grand Tour.  More and more this girl surprised him with graces foreign to this colonial soil, graces supposed by him to be classical and lost, the appanage of goddesses.

Like a goddess now she lifted an arm and pointed west, as he had pointed east.  Ahead of them, to the right of the road, rose a tall hill, wooded at the base, broken at the summit by craggy terraces.  Two large birds wheeled and hovered above it, high in the blue, fronting the sunlight.

“Eagles, by Jove!” cried Sir Oliver.

Ruth drew a breath and watched them.  She had never before seen an eagle.

“Will they have their nest in the cliffs?” she asked.

“Perhaps. . . .  No, more likely they come from Wachusett; more likely still, from the mountains beyond.  They are here seeking food.”

“They do not appear to be seeking food,” she said after a pause during which she watched their ambits of flight circling and intersecting “See the nearest one mounting, and the other lifting on a wider curve to meet him above.  One would say they followed some pattern, like folks dancing.”

“Some act of homage to the sun,” he suggested.  “They have come down to the sea to meet him - they look over the Atlantic from aloft there - and perform in his honour.  Who knows?”

Across Ruth’s inner vision there flashed a memory of Mr. Hichens, black-suited and bald, bending over his Hebrew Bible and expounding a passage of Job:  “Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high?  She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place. . . .”

To herself she said:  “If it be so, the eagle’s faith is mine; my lord’s also, perchance, if he but knew it.”

Aloud she asked, “Why are the noblest, birds and beasts, so few and solitary?”

Sir Oliver laughed.  “You may include man.  The answer is the same, and simple:  the strong of the earth feed on the weak, and it takes all the weaklings to make blood for the few.”

She mused; but when she spoke again it was not to dispute with him.  “You say they look over the sea from aloft there.  Might we have sight of it from the top of the hill?”

“Perhaps.  There is plenty of time to make sure before the coach overtakes us - though I warn you it will be risky.”

“I am not afraid.”

They cantered off gaily, plunged into the woods and breasted the slope, Sir Oliver leading and threading his way through the undergrowth.  By-and-by they came to the bed of a torrent and followed it up, the horses picking their steps upon the flat boulders between which the water trickled.  Some of these boulders were slimed and slippery, and twice Sir Oliver reached out a hand and hauled the mare firmly on to her quarters.

The belt of crags did not run completely around the hill.  At the back of it, after a scramble out of the gully, they came on a slope of good turf, and so cantered easily to the summit.

Ruth gave a little cry of delight, and followed it up with a yet smaller one of disappointment.  The country lay spread at her feet like a vast amphitheatre, ringed with wooded hills.  Across the plain they encircled a river ran in loops, and from the crag at the edge of which she stood a streamlet emerged and took a brave leap down the hill to join it.

“But where is the sea?”

“That small hill yonder must hide it.  You see it, with its line of elms?  If those trees were down, we should see the Atlantic for a certainty.  If you like the spot otherwise, I will have them removed.”

He said it seriously; but of course she took it for granted that he spoke in jest, albeit the jest puzzled her a little.  Indeed when she glanced up at him he was smiling, with his eyes on the distant landscape.

“The mountain too,” he added, “if the trees will not suffice.  Though not by faith, it shall be removed.”

Chapter X. - THREE LADIES.

“You may smoke,” said Dicky politely, setting down his glass.

“Thank you,” answered Mr. Hanmer.  “But are you sure?  In my experience of houses there’s always some one that objects.”

Dicky lifted his chin.  “We call this the nursery because it has always been the nursery.  But I do what I like here.”

Mr. Hanmer had accepted the boy’s invitation to pay him a visit ashore and help him to rig a model cutter - a birthday gift from his father; and the pair had spent an afternoon upon it, seated upon the floor with the toy between them and a litter of twine everywhere, Dicky deep in the mysteries of knots and splices, the lieutenant whittling out miniature blocks and belaying-pins with a knife that seemed capable of anything.

They had been interrupted by Manasseh, bearing a tray of refreshments -  bread and honey and cakes, with a jug of milk for the one; for the other a decanter of brown sherry with a dish of ratafia biscuits.  The repast was finished now, and Dicky, eager to fall to work again, feared that his friend might make an excuse for departing.

Mr. Hanmer put a hand in his pocket and drew out his pipe.

“Your father would call it setting a bad example, I doubt?”

To this the boy, had he been less loyal, might have answered that his father took no great stock in examples, bad or good.  He said:  “Papa smokes.  He says it is cleaner than taking snuff; and so it is, if you have ever seen Mr. Silk’s waistcoat.”

So Mr. Hanmer filled and lit his pipe, doing wonders with a pocket tinder-box.  Dicky watched the process gravely through every detail, laying up hints for manhood.

“I ought to have asked you before,” he said.  “Nobody comes here ever, except Mr. Silk and the servants.”

Hapless speech and bootless boast!  They had scarcely seated themselves to work again, the lieutenant puffing vigorously, before they heard footsteps in the corridor, with a rustle of silks, and a hand tapped on the door.

It opened as Dicky jumped to his feet, calling “Come in!” - and on the threshold appeared Mrs. Vyell, in walking dress.  Dicky liked Mrs. Harry, as he called her; but he stared in dismay at two magnificent ladies in the doorway behind her, and more especially at the elder of the twain, who, attired in puce-coloured silk, stiff as a board, walked in lifting a high patrician nose and exclaiming, -

“Fah!  What a detestable odour!”

Mr. Hanmer hurriedly hid his pipe and scrambled up, stammering an apology.  Dicky showed more self-possession.  He gave a little bow to the two strangers and turned to Mrs. Harry.

“I am sorry, Aunt Sarah.  But I didn’t know, of course, that you were coming and bringing visitors.”

“To be sure you did not, child,” said Mrs. Harry with a good-natured smile.  She was a cheerful, commonsensical person, pleasant of face rather than pretty, by no means wanting in wit, and radiant of happiness, just now, as a young woman should be who has married the man of her heart.  “But let me present you - to Lady Caroline Vyell and Miss Diana.”

Dicky bowed again.  “I am sorry, ma’am,” he repeated, addressing Lady Caroline.  “Mr. Hanmer has put out his pipe, you see, and the window is open.”

Lady Caroline carried an eyeglass with a long handle of tortoise-shell.  Through it she treated Dicky to a deliberate and disconcerting scrutiny, and lowered it to turn and ask Mrs. Harry, -

“You permit him to call you ’Aunt Sarah’?”

Mrs. Harry laughed.  “It sounds better, you will admit, than ‘Aunt Sally,’ and don’t necessitate my carrying a pipe in my mouth.  Oh yes,” she added, with a glance at the boy’s flushed face, “Dicky and I are great friends.  In any one’s presence but Mr. Hanmer’s I would say ‘the best of friends.’”

Lady Caroline turned her eyeglass upon Mr. Hanmer.  “Is this - er -  gentleman his tutor?” she asked.

The question, and the sight of the lieutenant’s mental distress, set Mrs. Harry laughing again.  “In seamanship only.  Mr. Hanmer is my husband’s second-in-command and one of the best officers in the Navy.”

“I consider smoking a filthy habit,” said Lady Caroline.

“Yes, ma’am,” murmured Mr. Hanmer.

The odious eyeglass was turned upon Dicky again.  He, to avoid it, glanced aside at Miss Diana.  He found Miss Diana less unpleasant than her mother, but attractive only by contrast.  She was a tall woman, handsome but somewhat haggard, with a face saved indeed from peevishness by its air of distinction, but scornful and discontented.  She had been riding, and her long, close habit became her well, as did her wide-brimmed hat, severely trimmed with a bow of black ribbon and a single ostrich feather.

“Diana,” said Lady Caroline, but without removing her stony stare, “the child favours his mother.”

“Indeed!” the girl answered indifferently.  “I never met her.”

“Oliver has her portrait somewhere, I believe.  We must get him to show it to us.  A toast in her day, and quite notably good-looking - though after a style I abominate.”  She turned to Mrs. Harry and explained:  “One of your helpless clinging women.  In my experience that sort does incomparably the worst mischief.”

“Oh, hush, please!” murmured Mrs. Harry.

But Lady Caroline came of a family addicted to speaking its thoughts aloud.  “Going to sea, is he?  Well, on the whole Oliver couldn’t do better.  The boy’s position here must be undesirable in many ways; and at sea a lad stands on his own feet - eh, Mr. - I did not catch your name?”

“Hanmer, ma’am.”

“Well, and isn’t it so?”

“Not altogether, ma’am,” stammered Mr. Hanmer.  “If ever your ladyship had been in the Navy -

“God bless the man!” Lady Caroline interjected.

“ - you’d have found that - that a good deal of kissing goes by favour, ma’am.”

“H’mph!” said Lady Caroline when Mrs. Harry had done laughing.  “The child will not lack protection, of course.  Whether ’tis to their credit or not I won’t say, but the Vyells have always shown a conscience for - er - obligations of this kind.”

On her way back to Sabines, where Sir Oliver had installed them, Lady Caroline again commended to her daughter his sound sense in packing the child off to sea.

“They will take ’em at any age, I understand; and Mrs. Vyell, it appears, has no objection.”

“She is not returning to Carolina by sea.”

“No; but she can influence her husband.  I must have another talk with her . . . a pleasant, unaffected creature, and, for a sailor’s wife, more than presentable.  One had hardly indeed looked to find such natural good manners in this part of the world.  Her mother was a Quakeress, she tells me:  yet she laughs a good deal, which I had imagined to be against their principles.  She doesn’t say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ either.”

“I heard her tutoyer her husband.”

“Indeed? . . .  Well,” Lady Caroline went on somewhat inconsequently, “Harry is a lucky man.  When one thinks of the dreadful connections these sailors are only too apt to form - though one cannot wholly blame them, their opportunities being what they are . . .  But, as I was saying, Oliver couldn’t have done better, for himself or for the child.  At home the poor little creature could never be but a question; and since he has this craze for salt water - curious he should resemble his uncle in this rather than his father - one may almost call it providential. . . .  At the same time, my dear, I wish you could have shown a little more interest.”

“In the child?  Why?”

“Really, Diana, I wish you would cure yourself of putting these abrupt questions. . . .  Your Cousin Oliver is now the head of the family, remember.  He has received us with uncommon cordiality, and put himself out not a little -

“I can believe that,” said Diana brusquely.

“And it says much.  All men are selfish, and Oliver as a youth was very far from being an exception.  I find the change in him significant of much. . . .  At the same time you have mixed enough in the world, dear, to know that young men will be young men, and this sort of thing happens, unfortunately.”

“If, mamma, you suppose I bear Cousin Oliver any grudge because of this child -

“I am heartily glad to hear you say it.  There should be, with us women, a Christian nicety in dealing with these - er - situations; in retrospect, at all events.  A certain - disgust, shall we say? - is natural, proper, even due to our sex:  I should think the worse - very far the worse - of my Diana did she not feel it.  But above all things, charity! . . .  And let me tell you, dear, what I could not have told at the time, but I think you are now old enough to know that such an experience is often the best cure for a man, who thereafter, should he be fortunate in finding the right woman, anchors his affections and proves the most assiduous of husbands.  This may sound paradoxical to you -

“Dear mamma” - Diana hid a smile and a little yawn together - “believe me it does not.”

“Such a man, then,” pursued Lady Caroline, faintly surprised, “is likely to be the more appreciative of any kindness shown to - er - what I may call the living consequence of his error.”

“Why not say ‘Dicky’ at once, mamma, and have done with it.”

“To Dicky, then, if you will; but I was attempting to lay down the general rule which Dicky illustrates.  A little gentle notice taken of the child not only appeals to the man as womanly in itself, but delicately conveys to him that the past is, to some extent, condoned.  He has sown his wild oats:  he is, so to speak, range; but he is none the less grateful for some assurance -

Lady Caroline’s discourse had whiled the way back to Sabines, to the drawing-room; and here Diana wheeled round on her with the question, sudden and straight, -

“Do you suppose that Cousin Oliver is range, as you call it?”

“My child, we have every reason to believe so.”

“Then what do you make of this?” The girl took up a small volume that lay on the top of the harpsichord, and thrust it into her mother’s hands.

“Eh?  What?” Lady Caroline turned the book back uppermost and spelled out the title through her eyeglass. “’Ovid’ - he’s Latin, is he not?  Dear, I had no notion that you kept up your studies in that - er -  tongue.”

“I do not.  I have forgot what little I learned of it, and that was next to nothing.  But open the book, please, at the title-page.”

“I see nothing.  It has neither book-plate nor owner’s signature.”  (Indeed Ruth never wrote her name in her books.  She looked upon them as her lord’s, and hers only in trust.)

“The title-page, I said.  You are staring at the flyleaf.”

“Ah, to be sure - ” Lady Caroline turned a leaf.  “Is this what you mean?” She held up a loose sheet of paper covered with writing.

“Read it.”

The elder lady found the range of her eyeglass and conned - in silence and without well grasping its purport - the following effusion: -

    Other maids make Love a foeman,
       Lie in ambush to defeat him;
       I alone will step to meet him
    Valiant, his accepted woman. 
          Equal, consort in his car,
          Ride I to his royal war.

        Victims of his bow and targe,
    Yet who toyed with lovers’ quarrels,
    Envy me my braver laurels! 
        Lord! thy shield of shadow large
        Lift above me, shout the charge!

“Well?”

“I make nothing of it,” owned Lady Caroline.  “It appears to be poetry of a sort - probably some translation from the Latin author.”

“You note, at least, that the handwriting is a woman’s?”

“H’m, yes,” Lady Caroline agreed.

“Nothing else?”

“Dear, you speak in riddles.”

“It is a riddle,” said Diana.  “Take the first letter of each line, and read them down, in order.”

“O, L, I, V, E, R V, Y, E, L, L,” spelled Lady Caroline, and lowered her eyeglass.  “My dear, as you say, this cannot be a mere coincidence.”

“Did I say that?” asked Diana.

“But who can it be, or have been? . . .  That Dance woman, perhaps?  She was infatuated enough.”

“It was not she,” said Diana positively.

“Somebody can tell us. . . .  That Mr. Silk, for instance.”

“Ah, you too think of him?”

“As a clergyman - and to some extent a boon companion of Oliver’s - he would be likely to know -

“ - And to tell?  You are quite right, mamma:  I have asked him.”

Chapter XI. - THE ESPIAL.

Ruth Josselin came down from the mountain to the stream-side, where, by a hickory bush under a knoll, her mare Madcap stood at tether.  Slipping behind the bush - though no living soul was near to spy on her -  she slid off her short skirt and indued a longer one more suitable for riding; rolled the discarded garment into a bundle which she strapped behind the saddle; untethered the mare, and mounted.

At her feet the plain stretched for miles, carpeted for the most part with short sweet turf and dotted in the distance with cattle, red in the sunlight that overlooked the mountain’s shoulder.  These were Farmer Cordery’s cattle, and they browsed within easy radius of a clump of elms clustered about Sweetwater Farm.  Some four miles beyond, on the far edge of the plain, a very similar clump of elms hid another farm, Natchett by name, in like manner outposted with cattle; and these were the only habitations of men within the ring of the horizon.

The afternoon sun cast the shadow of the mountain far across this plain, almost to the confines of Sweetwater homestead.  A breeze descended from the heights and played with Ruth’s curls as she rested in saddle for a moment, scanning the prospect; a gentle breeze, easily out-galloped.  Time, place, and the horse - all promised a perfect gallop; her own spirits, too.  For she had spent the day’s hot hours in clambering among the slopes, battling with certain craggy doubts in her own mind; and with the afternoon shadow had come peace at heart; and out of peace a certain careless exultation.  She would test the mare’s speed and enjoy this hour before returning to Tatty’s chit-chat, the evening lamp, and the office of family prayer with which Farmer Cordery duly dismissed his household for the night.

She pricked Madcap down the slope, and at the foot of it launched her on the gallop.  Surely, unless it be that of sailing on a reach and in a boat that fairly heels to the breeze, there is no such motion to catch the soul on high.  The breeze met the wind of her flight and was beaten by it, but still she carried the moment of encounter with her as a wave on the crest of which she rode.  It swept, lifted, rapt her out of herself - yet in no bodiless ecstasy; for her blood pulsed in the beat of the mare’s hoofs.  To surrender to it was luxury, yet her hand on the rein held her own will ready at call; and twice, where Sweetwater brook meandered, she braced herself for the water-jump, judging the pace and the stride; and twice, with many feet to spare, Madcap sailed over the silver-grey riband.

All the while, ahead of her, the mountain lengthened its shadow.  She overtook and passed it a couple of furlongs short of the homestead; passed it - so clearly defined it lay across the pasture - with a firmer hold on the rein, as though clearing an actual obstacle. . . .  She was in sunlight now.  Before her a wooden fence protected the elms and their enclosure.  At the gate of it by rule she should have drawn rein.

She had never leapt a gate; had attempted a bank now and then, but nothing serious.  Her success at the water-jumps tempted her; and the mare, galloping with her second wind, seemed to feel the temptation every whit as strongly.

In the instant of rising to it Ruth wondered what Farmer Cordery would say if she broke his top bar. . . .  The mare’s feet touched it lightly -  rap, rap.  She was over.

A wood pile stood within the gate to the left, hiding the house.  She had passed the corner of it before she could bring Madcap to a standstill, and was laughing to herself in triumph as she glanced around.

Heavens!

The house was of timber, with a deep timbered verandah; and in the verandah, not twenty paces away, beside a table laid for coffee, stood Tatty with three ladies about her - three ladies all elegantly dressed and staring.

Ruth’s hand went up quickly, involuntarily, to her dishevelled hair; and at the same moment the little lady, as though making a bolt from captivity, stepped down from the verandah and came shuffling across the yard towards her, almost at a run.

“Ruth, dear!” she panted.  “Oh, dear, dear!  I am so glad you have come!”

“Why, what’s the matter?” The girl, scenting danger, faced it.  She swung herself down from the saddle-crutch, picked up her skirt, and taking Madcap’s rein close beside the curb, walked slowly up to the verandah.  “Have they been bullying you, dear?” she asked in a low quiet voice.

“They have come all this way to see us - Lady Caroline Vyell, and Miss Diana; yes, and Mrs. Captain Vyell - ’Mrs. Harry,’ as Dicky calls her.  They have ferreted us out, somehow - and the questions they have been asking!  I think, dear - I really think - that in your place I should walk Madcap round to her stable and run indoors for a tidy-up before facing them.  A minute or two to prepare yourself - I can easily make your excuses.”

“And a moment since you were calling me to come and deliver you!” answered Ruth, still advancing.  “Present me, please.”

Little Miss Quiney, turning and running ahead, stammered some words to Lady Caroline, who paid no heed to them or to her but kept her eyeglass lifted and fixed upon Ruth.  Miss Diana stood a pace behind her mother’s shoulder; Mrs. Harry, after a glance at the girl, turned and made pretence to busy herself with the coffee-table.

“So you are the young woman!” ejaculated Lady Caroline.

“Am I?” said Ruth quietly, and after a profound curtsy turned sideways to the mare.  “A lump of sugar, Tatty, if you please. . . .  I thank you, ma’am - ” as Mrs. Harry, anticipating Miss Quiney, stepped forward with a piece held between the sugar-tongs.  “And I think she even deserves a second, for clearing the yard gate.”

She fed the gentle creature and dismissed her.  “Now trot around to your stall and ask one of the boys to unsaddle you!” She stood for ten seconds, may be, watching as the mare with a fling of the head trotted off obediently.  Then she turned again and met Mrs. Harry’s eyes with a frank smile.

“It is the truth,” she said.  “We cleared the gate.  Come, please, and admire -

Mrs. Harry, in spite of herself, stepped down from the verandah and followed.  The others stood as they were, planted in stiff disapproval.

The girl led Mrs. Harry to the corner of the wood pile.  “Admire!” she repeated, pointing with her riding-switch; and then, still keeping the gesture, she sank her voice and asked quickly, “Why are you here?  You have a good face, not like the others.  Tell me.”

“Lady Caroline - ” stammered Mrs. Harry, taken at unawares.  “She has a right, naturally, to concern herself -

“Does he know?”

“Sir Oliver?  No - I believe not. . . .  You see, the Vyells are a great family, and ‘family’ to them is a tremendous affair - a religion almost.  Whatever touches one touches all; especially when that one happens to be the head of his house.”

“Is that how Captain Vyell - how your husband - feels it? - No, please keep looking towards the gate.  I mean no harm by these questions, and you will not mind answering them, I hope?  It gives me just a little more chance of fair play.”

“To tell you the truth,” said Mrs. Harry, pretending to study the jump, “I looked at you because I could not help it.  You are an extraordinarily beautiful woman.”

“Thank you,” answered Ruth.  “But about ‘Captain Harry,’ as we call him?  I suppose he, as next of kin, is most concerned of all?”

“He did not tell me about you, if that is what you mean; or rather he told me nothing until I questioned him.  Then he owned that there was such a person, and that he had seen you.  But he does not even know of this visit; he imagines that Lady Caroline is taking me for a pleasure trip, just to view the country.”

Ruth turned towards the house.  “You will tell him, of course,” she said gravely, “when you return to the ship.”

“I - I suppose I shall,” confessed Mrs. Harry, and added, “There’s one thing.  You may suppose that, as his wife, I am as much concerned as any - perhaps more than these others.  But I don’t want you to think that I suggested hunting you up.”

“I do not think anything of the sort.  In fact I am sure you did not.”

“Thank you.”

Ruth had a mind to ask “Who, then, had brought them?” but refrained.  She had guessed, and pretty surely.

“Well,” she said with half a laugh, “you have been good and given me time to recover.  It’s heavy odds, you see, and - and I have not been trained for it, exactly.  But I feel better.  Shall we go back and face them?”

“One moment, again!” Mrs. Harry’s kindly face hung out signals of distress.  “It’s heavy odds, as you say.  Everything’s against you.  But the Lord knows I’m a well-meaning woman, and I’d hate to be unjust.  If only I could be sure - if only you would tell me -

Ruth stood still and faced her.

“Look in my eyes.”

Mrs. Harry looked and was convinced.  “But you love him,” she murmured; “and he -

“Ah, ma’am,” said Ruth, “I answer you one question, and you would ask me another!”

Chapter XII. - LADY CAROLINE.

She walked back to the verandah.

“I understand,” she said, “that Lady Caroline wishes a word with me.”

With a slight bow she led the way through a low window that opened upon the Corderys’ best parlour, through that apartment, and across a passage to the door of a smaller room lined with shelves - formerly a stillroom or store-chamber for home-made wines, cordials, preserves, but now converted into a boudoir for her use.  Its one window looked out upon the farmyard, now in shadow, and a farther doorway led to the dairy.  It stood open, and beyond it the eye travelled down a vista of cool slate flags and polished cream-pans.

On the threshold Ruth stood aside to let Lady Caroline enter; followed, and closed the door; stepped across and closed the door of the dairy.  Lady Caroline meanwhile found a seat, and, lifting her eyeglass, studied at long range the library disposed upon the store shelves.

“We had best be quite frank,” said she, as Ruth came back and stood before her.

“If you please.”

“Of course it is all very scandalous and - er - nauseating, though I dare say you are unable to see it in that light.  I merely mention it in justice to myself, lest you should mistake me as underrating or even condoning Sir Oliver’s conduct.  You will guess, at any rate, how it must shock my daughter.”

“Yes,” said Ruth; and added, “Why did you bring her?”

The girl’s attitude - erect before her, patient, but unflinching - had already gone some way to discompose Lady Caroline.  This straight question fairly disconcerted her; the worse because she could not quarrel with the tone of it.

“I wish,” she answered, “my Diana to face the facts of life, ugly though they may be.”  As if aware that this hardly carried conviction - for, despite herself, something in Ruth began to impress her - she shifted ground and went on, “But we will not discuss my daughter, please.  The point is, this state of things cannot continue.  It may be hard for you - I am trying to take your view of it - but what may pass in a young man of blood cannot be permitted when he succeeds to a title and the -  er - headship of his family.  It becomes then his duty to give that family clean heirs.  I put it plainly?”

Ruth bent her head for assent.

“Oliver Vyell, as no doubt you know, has already been mixed up in one entanglement, and has a child for reminder.”

“Oh, but Dicky is the dearest child!  The sweetest-natured, the cleanest-minded!  Have you not seen him yet?”

Lady Caroline stared.  As little as royalty did she understand being cross-questioned.  It gave her a quite unexpected sense of helplessness.

“I fear you do not at all grasp the position,” she said severely.  “After all, I had done better to disregard your feelings, whatever they may be, and come to terms at once.”

“No,” answered Ruth, musing; “I do not understand the position; but I want to, more than I can say - and your ladyship must help me, please.”  She paused a moment.  “In New England we prize good birth, good breeding, and what we too call ‘family’; but I think the word must mean something different to you who live at home in England.”

“I should hope so!” breathed Lady Caroline.

“It must be mixed up somehow with the great estates you have held for generations and the old houses you have lived in.  No,” she went on, as Lady Caroline would have interrupted; “please let me work it out in my own way, and then you shall correct me where I am wrong. . . .  I have often thought how beautiful it must be to live in such an old house, one that has all its corners full of memories - the nurseries most of all -  of children and grandchildren, that have grown up in gentleness and courtesy and honour -

“Good Lord!” Lady Caroline interjected.  “You mean” - Ruth smiled -  “that I am talking like a book?  That is partly my fault and partly our New England way; because, you see, we have to get at these things from books.  Does it, after all, matter how - if only we get it right? . . .  There’s a tradition - what, I believe, you call an ’atmosphere’ - and you are proud of it and very jealous.”

“If you see all this,” said Lady Caroline, mollified, “our business should be easier, with a little common sense on your part.”

“And it knits you,” pursued Ruth, “into a sort of family conspiracy -  the womenkind especially - like bees in a hive.  The head of the family is the queen bee, and you respect him amazingly; but all the same you keep your own judgment, and know when to thwart and when to disobey him, for his own and the family’s good.  I think you disobeyed Sir Oliver in coming here; or, at least, deceived him and came here without his knowledge.”

“I am not accustomed,” said Lady Caroline, rising, “to direct my conduct upon my nephew’s advice.”

“That, more or less, is what I was trying to say.  Dear madam, let me warn you to do so, if you would manage his private affairs.”

They faced each other now, upon declared war.  Lady Caroline’s neck was suffused to a purplish red behind the ears.  She gasped for speech.  Before she found it there came a tapping on the door, and Diana Vyell entered.

Chapter XIII. - DIANA VYELL.

“Have you not finished yet?” Miss Diana closed the door, glanced from one to the other, and laughed with a genial brutality.  “Well, it’s time I came.  Dear mamma, you seem to be getting your feathers pulled.”

There was a byword among the Whig families at home (who, by intermarrying, had learned to gauge another’s weaknesses), that “the Pett medal showed ill in reverse.”  Miss Diana had heard the saying.  As a Vyell - the Vyells were, before all things, critical - she knew it to be just, as well as malicious; but as a dutiful daughter she ought to have remembered.

As it was, her cool comment stung her mother to fury.  The poor lady pointed a finger at Ruth, and spluttered (there is no more elegant word for the very inelegant exhibition), -

“A strumpet!  One that has been whipped through the public streets.”

There was a dreadful pause.  Miss Diana, the first to recover herself, stepped back to the door and held it open.

“You must excuse dear mamma,” she said coolly.  “She has overtired herself.”

But Lady Caroline continued to point a finger trembling with passion.

“Her price!” she shrilled.  “Ask her that.  It is all these creatures ever understand!”

Miss Diana slipped an arm beneath her elbow and firmly conducted her forth.  Ruth, hearing the door shut, supposed that both women had withdrawn.  She sank into a chair, and was stretching out her arms over the table to bury her face in them and sob, when the voice of the younger said quietly behind her shoulder, -

“It is always hard, after mamma’s tantrums, to bring the talk back to a decent level.  Nevertheless, shall we try?”

Ruth had drawn herself up again, rallying the spirit in her.  It was weary, bruised; but its hour of default was not yet.  Her voice dragged, but just perceptibly, as she answered Miss Vyell, who nodded, noting her courage and wondering a little, -

“I am sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes; it was partly my fault - very largely my fault.  But your mother angered me from the first by assuming - what she had no right to assume.  It was horrible.”

Diana Vyell seated herself, eyed her steadily for a moment, and nodded again.  “Mamma can be raide, there’s no denying.  She was wrong, of course; that’s understood. . . .  Still, on the whole you have done pretty well, and had your revenge.”

Ruth’s eyes widened, for this was beyond her.

Diana explained.  “You have let us make the most impossible fools of ourselves.  It may have been more by luck than by good management, as they say; but there it is.  Now don’t say that revenge isn’t sweet. . . .  I’ve done you what justice I can; but if you pose as an angel from heaven, it’s asking too much.”  While Ruth considered this, she added, “I don’t know if you can put yourself in mamma’s place for a moment; but if you can, the hoax is complete enough, you’ll admit.”

“I had rather put myself in yours.”

Their eyes met, and Diana’s cheek reddened slightly.  “You are an extraordinary girl,” she said, “and there seems no way but to be honest with you.  Unfortunately, it’s not so easy, even with the best will in the world.  Can you understand that?”

“If you love him -

“Oh, for pity’s sake spare me!” Diana bounced up and stepped to the window.  The red on her cheek had deepened, and she averted it to stare out at the poultry in the yard.  “You are unconscionable,” she said after a while, with a vexed laugh.  “I have known my cousin Oliver since we were children together.  Really, you know, you’re almost as brutal as mamma. . . .  The truth?  Let me see.  Well, the truth, so near as I can tell it, is that I just let mamma have her head, and waited to see what would happen.  This was her expedition, and I took no responsibility for it from the first.”

“I understand.”  Ruth, watching the back of her head, spoke musingly, with pursed lips.

“Excuse me” - Diana wheeled about suddenly - “you cannot possibly understand just yet.  This last was my tenth season in London.  One grows weary . . . and then in the confusion of papa’s death -  It comes to this, that I was ready for anything to get out of the old rut.  I - I - shall we say that I just cast myself on fate?  It may have been at the back of my head that whatever happened might be worse, but couldn’t well be wearier.  But if you think I had any design of setting my cap at him -

“Hush!” said Ruth softly.  “I had no such thought.”

“And if you had, you would not have cared,” said Diana, eyeing her again long and steadily.  “Mamma - you really must forgive mamma.  If you knew them, there was never a Pett that was not impayable.  Mamma spoke of asking your price. . . .  As if, for any price, he would give you up!”

“I have no price to ask, of him or of any one.”

“No, and you need have none.  I am often very disagreeable,” said Diana candidly, “but my worst enemy won’t charge me with disparaging good looks in other women.”

“May I use your words,” said Ruth, with a shy smile, “and say that you have no need?”

“Rubbish!  And don’t talk like that to me, sitting here and staring you in the face, or I may change my mind again and hate you!  I never said I didn’t envy. . . .  But there, the fault was mine for speaking of ‘good looks’ when I should have said, ‘Oh, you wonder!’” broke off Diana.  “May I ask it - one question?”

“Twenty, if you will.”

“It is a brutal one; horrible; worse even than mamma’s.”

“As I remember,” said Ruth gravely, “Lady Caroline asked none.  It was I who did the questioning, and - and I am afraid that led to the trouble.”

Diana laughed, and after a moment the two were laughing together.

“But what is your question?”

“No, I cannot ask it now.”  Diana shook her head, and was grave again.

“Please!”

“Well, then, tell me - ” She drew back, slightly tilting her chin and narrowing her eyes, as one who contemplates a beautiful statue or other work of art.  “Is it true they whipped that, naked, through the streets?”

Ruth bent her head.

“It is true.”

“I wonder it did not kill you,” Diana murmured.

“I am strong; strong and very healthy. . . .  It broke something inside; I hardly know what.  But there’s a story - I read it the other day - about a man who wandered in a dark wood, and came to a place where he looked into hell.  Just one glimpse.  He fainted, and when he awoke it was daylight, with the birds singing all around him.  But he was changed more than the place, for he listened and understood all the woodland talk - what the birds were saying, and the small creeping things.  And when he went back among men he answered at random, and yet in a way that astonished them; for he saw and heard what their hearts were saying, at the back of their talk. . . .  Of course,” smiled Ruth, “I am not nearly so wonderful as that.  But something has happened to me -

Diana nodded slowly. “ - Something that, at any rate, makes you terribly disconcerting.  But what about Oliver?  They tell me that he browbeat the magistrates and insisted on sitting beside you.”

Ruth’s eyes confirmed it.  They were moist, yet proud.  They shone.

“I had always,” mused Diana, “looked on my cousin as a carefully selfish person, even in the matter of that Dance woman.  You must have turned his head completely.”

“It was not that.”

Diana stared, the low tone was so earnest, vehement even.  “Well, at all events I know him well enough to assure you he will never give you up.”

“Ah!” Ruth drew a long sigh over the joy in her heart, and, a second later, hated herself for it.

“ - until afterwards.”

“Afterwards?” the girl echoed.

“Afterwards.  My cousin Oliver is a tenacious man, and you would seem to have worked him up to temporary heroics.  But I beg you to reflect that what for you must have been a real glimpse into hell” - Diana shivered - ” was likely enough for him no more than an occasion for posing.  Fine posing, I’ll allow.”  She paused.  “It didn’t degrade him, actually.  He’s a Vyell; and as another of ’em I may tell you there never was a Vyell could face out actual degradation.  You almost make me wish we were capable of it.  To lose everything - ” She paused again.  “You make it more alluring, somehow, than the prospect of endless London seasons - Diana Vyell, with a fading face and her market missed - that’s how they’ll put it - and, pour me distraire this side of the grave, the dower-house, a coach, a pair of wind-broken horses, and the consolations of religion!  If we were capable of it. . . .  But where’s the use of talking?  We’re Vyells.  And - here’s my point - Oliver is a Vyell.  He may be strong-willed, but - did mamma happen to talk at all about the ’Family’?”

“I think,” answered Ruth with another faint flash of mirth, “it was I who asked her questions about it.”

Diana threw out her hands, laughing.  “You are invincible!  Well, I cannot hate you; and I’ve given you my warning.  Make him marry you; you can if you choose, and now is your time.  If there should be children -  legitimate children, O my poor mamma! - there will be the devil to pay and helpless family councils, all of which I shall charge myself to enjoy and to report to you.  If there should be none, we’re safe with Mrs. Harry.  She’ll breed a dozen. . . .  Am I coarse?  Oh, yes, the Vyells can be coarse! while as for the Petts - but you have heard dear mamma.”

They talked together for a few minutes after this.  But their talk shall not be reported:  for with what do you suppose it dealt?

In the midst of it, and while Ruth listened eagerly to what Diana had to tell of London fashions, Lady Caroline’s voice was heard summoning her daughter away.

Diana rose.  “It is close upon dusk,” she said, “and Mrs. Harry has command of the waggon.  She drives very well - not better than I perhaps; but she understands this country better.  All the same, the road - call it an apology for one - bristles with tree-stumps, and mamma’s temper will be unendurable if the dark overtakes us before we reach the next farm.  I forget its name.”

“Natchett?”

“Yes, Natchett.  We spend the night there.”

“But why did not Mr. Silk drive you over?”

“Did mamma tell you he was escorting us?”

“No.  I guessed.”

“Nasty little fellow.  Sloppy underlip.  I cannot bear him.  Can you?”

“I do not like him.”

“It’s a marvel to me that my cousin tolerates him. . . .  By the way, I shall not wonder if he - Oliver, I mean - loses his temper heavily when he learns of our expedition, and bundles us straight back to Europe.  I warned mamma.”

“So - I am afraid - did I.”

“Yes?” - and again they laughed together.

“My poor parent! . . .  She assured me that her duty to the Family was her armour of proof.  Hark!  She’s calling again.”

They found Lady Caroline impatient in the verandah.  Ruth, to avoid speech with her, walked away to the waggon.  Farmer Cordery stood at the horse’s head, and Mrs. Harry beside the step, ready to mount and take the reins.

But for some reason Mrs. Harry delayed to mount.  “Is it you?” she said vaguely and put out a hand, swaying slightly.  Ruth caught it.

“Are you ill?”

They were alone together for a moment and hidden from the farmer, who stood on the far side of the horse.

“Nothing - a sudden giddiness.  It’s quite absurd, too; when I’ve been as strong as a donkey all my life.”

Ruth asked her a question. . . .  Some word of woman’s lore, dropped years ago by her own silly mother, crossed her memory. (They had been outspoken, in the cottage above the beach.) It surprised Mrs. Harry, who answered it before she was well aware, and so stood staring, trembling with surmise.

“God bless you!” Ruth put out an arm on an impulse to clasp her waist, but checked it and beckoned instead to Diana.

“You take the reins and drive,” she commanded.

Diana questioned her with a glance, but obeyed and climbed on board.  Ruth was helping Mrs. Harry to mount after her when Lady Caroline thrust herself forward, by the step.

Now since Diana had hold of the reins, and Mrs. Harry was for the moment in no condition to lend a hand, and since Lady Caroline would as lief have touched leprosy as have accepted help from Ruth Josselin, her ascent into the van fell something short of dignity.  The rearward of her person was ample; she hitched her skirt in the step, thus exposing an inordinate amount of not over-clean white stocking; and, to make matters worse, Farmer Cordery cast off at the wrong moment and stood back from the horse’s head.

“Losh! but I’m sorry,” said he, gazing after the catastrophic result.  “Look at her, there, kickin’ like a cast ewe. . . .”  He turned a serious face on Ruth and added, “Vigorous, too, for her years.”

Ruth, returning to the verandah, bent over little Miss Quiney, who sat unsmiling, with rigid eyes.  “Dear Tatty,” - she kissed her - “were they so very dreadful?”

Miss Quiney started as if awaking from a nightmare.

“That woman - darling, whatever her rank, I cannot term her a lady! -

“Go on, dear.”

“I cannot.  Sit beside me, here, for a while, and let me feel my arm about you. . . .”

They sat thus for a long while silent, while twilight crept over the plain and wrapped itself about the homestead.

Ruth was thinking.  “If I forfeit this, it will be hardest of all.”

Chapter XIV. - MR. SILK PROPOSES.

Farmer Cordery had six grown sons - Jonathan, George, William, Increase, Homer, and Lemuel - the eldest eight-and-twenty, the youngest sixteen.  All were strapping fellows, and each as a matter of course had fallen over head and ears in love with Ruth.

They were good lads and knew it to be hopeless.  She had stepped into their home as a goddess from a distant star, to abide with them for a while.  They worshipped, none confessing his folly; but it made them her slaves, and emulous to shine before her as though she had been a queen of tournay.  Because of her presence (it must be sadly owned) challengings, bickerings, even brotherly quarrels, disturbed more and more the patriarchal peace of Sweetwater Farm.  “I dunno what’s come over the boys,” their father grumbled; “al’ays showing off an’ jim-jeerin’.  Regilar cocks on a dunghill.  A few years agone I’d ’ve cured it wi’ the strap; but now there’s no remedy.”

William had challenged his eldest brother Jonathan to “put” a large round-shot that lay in the verandah.  Their father had brought it home from the capture of Louisbourg as a souvenir.  Jonathan and George had served at Louisbourg too, in the Massachusetts Volunteers; but William, though of age to fight, had been left at home to look after the farm and his mother.  It had been a sore disappointment at the time; now that Jonathan and George had taken on a sudden to boast, it rankled.  Hence the challenge.  The three younger lads joined in.  If they could not defeat their seniors, they could at least dispute the mastery among themselves.  Thereupon in all seriousness (ingenuous youths!) they voted that Miss Josselin should be asked to umpire.

The contest took place next morning after breakfast, in a paddock beyond the elms, with Ruth for umpire and sole spectator.  Nothing had been said to the farmer, who was fast losing his temper with “these derned wagerings,” and might have come down with a veto that none dared disobey.  He had ridden off, however, at sun-up to the mountain, to look after the half-wild hogs he kept at pasture among the woods at its base.

Ruth measured out the casts conscientiously.  In no event would the young men have disputed her arbitrament; but, as it happened, this nicety was thrown away.  Jonathan’s “put” of forty feet - the shot weighed close upon sixteen pounds - easily excelled the others’, who were sportsmen and could take a whipping without bad blood or dispute.  The winner crowed a little, to be sure; it was the New England way.  But Lemuel the youngest, who had outgrown his strength, had made a deplorable “put,” and the rest jeered at him, to relieve their feelings.  The boy fired up.  “Oh, have your laugh!” he blazed, with angry tears in his eyes.  “But when it comes to running, there’s not one of you but knows I can put circles round him.”

“Take you on, this moment,” answered up young Increase.  “Say, boys, we’ll all take him on.”

Jonathan had no mind for any such “foolishness.”  He had won, and was content; and running didn’t become the dignity of a grown man.  “We didn’t run at Louisbourg, I guess.”  George echoed him.  George could out-tire even Jonathan at wood-cutting, but had no length of leg.

But Ruth having compassion on the boy’s hurt feelings, persuaded them.  They could refuse no straight request of hers.  She pointed to an outlying elm that marked the boundary of the second pasture field beyond the steading.  This should be the turning-post, and would give them a course well over half a mile, with a water-jump to be crossed twice.  She ranged them in line, and dropped her handkerchief for signal.

They were off.  She stood with the sun at her back and watched the race.  George, of the short legs, broad shoulders, and bullet head, was a sprinter (as we call it nowadays) and shot at once to the front, with Homer not far behind, and Increase disputing the third place with Lemuel.  Jonathan and William made scarcely a show of competing.  The eldest lad, indeed, coming to the brook, did not attempt to jump, but floundered heavily through it, scrambled up the farther bank, and lumbered on in hopeless pursuit.  It was here that Lemuel’s long easy stride asserted itself, and taking first place he reached the tree with several yards’ lead.

“He will win at his ease now,” said Ruth to herself; and just at that moment her ears caught the sound of a horse’s footfall.  She turned; but the sun shone full in her eyes, and not for a second or two did she recognise her visitor, Mr. Silk.

He was on horseback, and, stooping from his saddle, was endeavouring just now - but very unhandily - to unhasp the gate with the crook of his riding-whip.  Ruth did not offer to go to his help.

He managed it at last, thrust the horse through by vigorous use of his knees, and was riding straight up to the house.  But just then he caught sight of her, changed his course, and came towards her at a walk.

“Ah, good-morning!” he called.

“Good-morning.”

He dismounted.  “Thought I’d ride over and pay you a call.  The ladies will not be starting on their return journey for another couple of hours.  So I borrowed a horse.”

“Evidently.”

“There’s something wrong with him, I doubt.”  Mr. Silk was disagreeably red and moist.

“I dare say he is not used to being ridden mainly - or was it wholly? - on the curb.”

He grinned.  “Well, and I’m not used to riding, and that’s a fact.  But” - he leered the compliment - “there are few dangers I would not brave for a glance from Miss Josselin.”

“You flatter me, sir.  But I believe you braved a worse, yesterday, without claiming that reward.”

“Ah!  You mean that Sir Oliver will be angry when he gets wind of our little expedition?  The ladies persuaded me - Adam’s old excuse; I can deny nothing to the sex. . . .  But what have we yonder?  A race?”

“It would appear so.”

“A very hollow one, if I may criticise.  That youngster moves like a deer. . . .  And what is his reward to be? - another glance of these bright eyes?  Ah, Miss Josselin, you make fools - and heroes - of us all!”

Ruth turned from him to applaud young Lemuel, who came darting into the enclosure.

“See old Jonathan!” panted the boy, looking back and laughing.  “That’s how they ran at Louisbourg. . . .  Miss Josselin, you should have made it a mile and I’d have shown you some broken-winded ones.”  He laughed again and turned in apology to Mr. Silk.  “I’ll take your horse to stable, sir, if you’ll let me catch my breath.”

The others came straggling up, a little abashed at sight of the stranger, but not surprised out of their good manners.

“A clergyman?” said Jonathan.  “My father will be home before sundown, sir.  He will be proud if you can stay and have dinner with us.”

Mr. Silk explained that he had ridden over from Natchett to call on Miss Josselin and had but an hour to spare.  They insisted, however, that he must eat before leaving, and they led away his horse to bait, leaving him and Ruth together.

“Will you come into the house?” she asked.

“With your leave we can talk better here. . . .  So you guessed that I made one of the party?  Miss Vyell told me.”

“It was not difficult to guess.”

“And you admired my courage?”

Ruth’s eyebrows went up to a fine arch.  “When you were careful to keep in hiding?”

“From motives of delicacy, believe me.  It occurred to me that Lady Caroline might - er - speak her mind, and I had no wish to be distressed by it, or to distress you with my presence.”

“I thank you for so much delicacy, sir.”

“But Lady Caroline - let us do her justice!  She calls a spade a spade, but there’s no malice in it.  You stood up to her, I gather.  We’ve been discussing you this morning, and you may take my word she don’t think the worse of you for it.  They’re sportsmen, these high-born people.  I come of good family myself, and know the sort.  ’Slog and take a slogging; shake hands and no bad blood’ - that’s their way.  The fine old British way, after all.”  Mr. Silk puffed his cheeks and blew.

“You have been discussing me with Lady Caroline?”

“Yes,” he answered flatly.  “Yes,” he repeated, and rolled his eyes.  “All for your good, you know.  Of course she started by calling you names and taking the worst for granted.  But I wouldn’t have that.”

“Go on, sir, if you please.”

“I wouldn’t have it, because I didn’t believe it.  If I did - hang it! -  I shouldn’t be here.  You might do me that justice.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m coming to that; but first I want you to open your eyes to the position.  You may think it’s all very pretty and romantic and like Fair Rosamond - without the frailty as yet:  that’s granted.  But how will it end?  Eh?  That’s the question, if you’d bring your common sense to bear on it.”

“Suppose you help me, sir,” said Ruth meekly.

“That’s right.  I’m here to help, and in more ways than one. . . .  Well, I know Sir Oliver; Lady Caroline knows him too; and if it’s marriage you’re after, you might as well whistle the moon.  You don’t believe me?” he wound up, for she was eyeing him with an inscrutable smile.

She lifted her shoulder a little.  “For the sake of your argument we will say that it is so.”

“Then what’s to be the end?  I repeat.  Look here, missy.  We spar a bit when we meet, you and I; but I’d be sorry to see you go the way you’re going.  ’Pon my honour I would.  You’re as pretty a piece of flesh as a man could find on this side of the Atlantic, and what’s a sharp tongue but a touch of spice to it?  Piquancy, begad, to a fellow like me! . . .  And - what’s best of all, perhaps - you’d pass for a lady anywhere.”

She shrank back a pace before this incredible vulgarity; but not even yet did she guess the man’s drift.

“So I put it to you, why not?” he continued, flushing as he came to the point and contemplated his prey.  “You don’t see yourself as a parson’s wife, eh?  You’re not the cut.  But for that matter I’m not the ordinary cut of parson.  T’other side of the water we’d fly high.  They’ll not have heard of Port Nassau, over there, nor of the little nest at Sabines; and with Lady Caroline to give us a jump-off - I have her promise.  She runs a Chapel of her own, somewhere off St. James’s.  Give me a chance to preach to the fashionable - let me get a foot inside the pulpit door - and, with you to turn their heads in the Mall below, strike me if I wouldn’t finish up a Bishop! La belle Sauvage - they’d put it around I’d found my beauty in the backwoods, and converted her. . . .  Well, what d’ye say?  Isn’t that a prettier prospect than to end as Sir Oliver’s cast-off?”

She put a hand backwards, and found a gate-rail to steady her.

“Ah! . . .  How you dare!” she managed to murmur.

“Dare?  Eh! you’re thinking of Sir Oliver?” He laughed easily.  “Lady Caroline will put that all right.  He’ll be furious at first, no doubt; my fine gentleman thinks himself the lion in the fable - when he shares out the best for himself, no dog dares bark.  But we’ll give him the go-by, and afterwards he can’t squeal without showing himself the public fool. . . .  Squeal?  I hope he will.  I owe him one.”

At this moment young George and Increase Cordery came past the far corner of the house with their team, their harness-chains jingling as they rode afield.  At sight of them a strong temptation assailed Ruth, but she thrust it from her.

“Sir” - she steadied her voice - “bethink you, please, that I have only to lift a hand and those two, with their brothers, will drag you through the farm pond.”

Before he could answer, she called to them.  As they turned and walked their horses towards her she glanced at Mr. Silk, half mischievously in spite of her fierce anger.  He was visibly perturbed; but his face, mottled yellow with terror, suggested loathing rather than laughter.

“I am sorry to trouble you, but will you please fetch Mr. Silk’s horse?  He must return at once.”

When they were gone she turned to him.

“I am sorry to dismiss you thus, sir, after the - the honour you have done me; the more sorry because you will never understand.”

Indeed - his scare having passed - he was genuinely surprised, indignant.

“I understand this much,” he answered coarsely, “that I’ve offered to make you an honest woman, but you prefer to be - ” The word was on his tongue-tip, but hung fire there.

She had turned her back on him, and stood with her arms resting for support on the upper rail of the gate.  She heard him walk away towards the stable-yard. . . .  By-and-by she heard him ride off - heard the click of the gate behind him.  A while after this she listened, and then bowed her face upon her arms.

Chapter XV. - THE CHOOSING.

The minutes passed, and still she leaned there.  At long intervals, when a sob would not be repressed, her shoulders heaved and fell.  But it was characteristic of Ruth Josselin throughout her life that she hated to indulge in distress, even when alone.  As a child she had been stoical; but since the day of her ordeal in Port Nassau she had not once wept in self-pity.  She had taught herself to regard all self-pity as shameful.

She made no sound.  The morning heat had increased, and across it the small morning noises of the farm were borne drowsily - the repeated strokes of a hatchet in the backyard, where young Lemuel split logs; the voice of Mrs. Cordery, also in the backyard, calling the poultry for their meal of Indian corn; the opening and shutting of windows as rooms were redded and dusted; lastly, Miss Quiney’s tentative touch on the spinet.  Sir Oliver in his lordly way had sent a spinet by cart from Boston; and Tatty, long since outstripped by her pupil, had a trick of picking out passages from the more difficult pieces of music and “sampling” them as she innocently termed it - a few chords now and again, but melodies for the most part, note by note hesitatingly attempted with one finger.

For a while these noises fell on Ruth’s ear unheeded.  Then something like a miracle happened.

Of a sudden either the noises ceased or she no longer heard them.  It was as if a hush had descended on the farmstead; a hush of expectancy.  Still leaning on the gate, she felt it operate within her - an instantaneous calm at first, soothing away the spirit’s anguish as though it were ointment delicately laid on a bodily wound.  Not an ache, even, left for reminder! but healing peace at a stroke, and in the hush of it small thrills awaking, stirring, soft ripples scarcely perceptible, stealing, hesitating, until overtaken by reinforcements of bliss and urged in a flood, bathing her soul.

He was near!  He must be here, close at hand!

She lifted her head and gazed around.  For minutes her closed eyeballs had been pressed down upon her arms, and the sunlight played tricks with her vision.  Strange hues of scarlet and violet danced on the sky and around the fringes of the elms.

But he was there!  Yes, beyond all doubting it was he. . . .

He had ridden in through the gateway on his favourite Bayard, and with a led horse at his side.  He was calling, in that easy masterful voice of his, for one of the Cordery lads to take the pair to stable.  Lemuel came running.

In the act of dismounting he caught sight of her and paused to lift his hat.  But before dismissing the horses to stable he looked them over, as a good master should.

He was coming towards her. . . .  Three paces away he halted, and his smile changed to a frown.

“You are in trouble?”

“It has passed.  I am happy now; and you are welcome, my lord.”

She gave him her hand.  He detained it.

“Who has annoyed you?  Those women?”

She shook her head.  “You might make a better guess, for you must have met him on the way.  Mr. Silk was here a while ago.”

“Silk?”

“And he - he asked me to marry him.”

“The hound!  But I don’t understand.  Silk here?  I see the game; he must have played escort to those infernal women. . . .  Somehow I hadn’t suspected it, and Lady Caroline kept that cat in the bag when I surprised her at Natchett an hour ago.  I wonder why?”

Ruth had a shrewd guess; but, fearing violence, forbore to tell it.

He went on:  “But what puzzles me more is, how I missed meeting him.”

In truth the explanation was simple enough.  Mr. Silk, turning the corner of the lane, where it bent sharply around Farmer Cordery’s wood-stacks, had chanced to spy Sir Oliver on a rise of the road to the eastward, and had edged aside and taken cover behind the stacks.  He was now making for Natchett at his best speed.

“A while ago, you say?  How long ago?  The thief cannot have gone far - ” Sir Oliver looked behind him.  Clearly he had a mind to call for his horse again and to pursue.

But Ruth put out a hand.  “He is not worth my lord’s anger.”

For a moment he stood undecided, then broke into a laugh. 
“Was he riding?”

“He was on horseback, to be more exact.”

“Then he’ll find it a stony long way back to Boston.”  He laughed again.  “You see, I’ve been worrying myself, off and on, about that trick of Madcap’s - I’ll be sworn she came within an ace of crossing her legs that day.  I’d a mind to ride over and bring you Forester - he’s a soberer horse, and can be trusted at timber.  I’d resolved on it, in short, even before my brother Harry happened to blurt out the secret of Lady Caroline’s little expedition.  Soon as I heard that, I put George the groom on Forester, and came in chase. . . .  I find her ladyship at Natchett, and after some straight talking I put George in charge of the conspirators, with instructions to drive them home.  They chose to say nothing of Silk, and I didn’t guess; so now the rogue must either leg it back or gall himself on a waggon-horse.”

“You worried yourself about me?”

“Certainly.  You don’t suppose I want my pupil to break her neck?”

“You do Madcap injustice.  Why, yesterday she jumped - she almost flew -  this very gate on which I am leaning.”

“The more reason - ” he began, and broke off.  His tone had been light, but when he spoke again it had grown graver, sincerer.  “It is a fact that I worried about you, but that is not all the reason why I am here.  The whole truth is more selfish. . . .  Ruth, I cannot do without you.”

She put up a hand, leaning back against the gate as though giddy.

“But why?” he urged, as she made no other response.  “Is it that you still doubt me - or yourself, perhaps?”

“Both,” she murmured.  “It is not so easy as you pretend.”  Bliss had weakened her for a while, but the weakness was passing.

“Those women have been talking to you.  I can engage, whatever they said, I gave it back to ’em with interest.  They sail by the next ship. . . .  But what did they say?”

“They say.  What say they?  Let them say,” Ruth quoted, her lips smiling albeit her eyes were moist.  “Does it matter what they said?”

“No; for I can guess.  However the old harridan put it, you were asked to give me up; and, after all, everything turns on our answer to that.  I have given you mine.  What of yours?” He stepped close.  “Ruth, will you give me up?”

She put out her hands as one groping, sightless, and in pain.

“Ah, you are cruel! . . .  You know I cannot.”