him a false springtide of the heart and delay by so long the revenge of
his past upon his present self.


Midway in the third week the weather broke.  He had foreseen this, and
early one morning set forth upon Bayard, the mare following obediently
as a dog, along the downhill circuit to the village.  There he would
leave them in stall at the Ferry Inn, to be fetched by his grooms.
Ruth walked some way beside him, telling off a list of purchases to be
made at the village store to replenish their household stock.

She left him and turned back, under boughs too bare to hide the lowering
sky.  She had gained the hut and he the village before the storm broke.
Indeed it gave him time to make his purchases and reach the Inn, where a
heavy mail-bag awaited him.  He was served with bread, cheese, and beer
in the Inn parlour, and dealt with the letters then and there; answering
some, tearing up others, albeit still with a sense of bringing back his
habits of business to a world with which he had no concern.  While he
wrote, always in haste, on the cheap paper the Inn supplied, the storm
broke and with such darkness that he pulled out his watch.  It was yet
early afternoon.  He called for candles and wrote on.

The last letter, addressed to Batty Langton, Esquire, he superscribed
"_Most urgent_," and having sealed it, arose and shouldered his sack for
the homeward tramp.  By this time the wind howled through the village
street, blowing squall upon squall of rain before it.  It blew, too,
dead in his path; but he faced it cheerfully.

Before he gained what should have been the shelter of the woods, the
gale had increased so that they gave less than the road had given.
The trees rocked above him; leaves and dead twigs beat on his face, and
at length the blast forced him almost to creep on all fours.  It was
dark, too, beneath the swaying boughs.  But uppermost in his mind was
fear for his love, lest the hut should have given way before the
tempest, and she be lying crushed beneath it.

Still he fought his way.  Darkness--the real darkness--was falling, and
he was yet a mile from the hut when in his path a figure arose from the
undergrowth where it had been crouching.

"Ruth!"

"Ah, you are safe! . . . I could not rest at home--"

They took hands and forced their way against the wind.

"The cabin?"

"It stands, please God!"

After much battling they spied the light shining through the louvers of
its closed shutter.  The gale streamed down the valley as through a
funnel, but once past the angle of the cliff they found themselves
almost in a calm.  He pushed the door open.

On the hearth--the hearth of his building--a pile of logs burned
cheerfully.  Over these the kettle hissed; and the firelight fell on
their bed, with its linen oversheet turned back and neatly folded.

She entered and he closed the door behind her.  She laughed as he pushed
its bolt.  They were drenched to the skin, the pair.

"This is best," said she with another soft and happy laugh.

"This is best," he repeated after her.  "Better even than in fair
weather."



Chapter VIII.


HOME-COMING.


A week later they broke camp and set forth to climb to the head of the
pass.

Behind it--so Sir Oliver had learnt from old Strongtharm--lay an almost
flat table-land, of pine-forest for the most part, through which for
maybe half a dozen miles their river ran roughly parallel with another
that came down from the north-west.  At one point (the old fellow
declared) less than a mile divided their waters.

"Seems," he said, "as if Nature all along intended 'em to jine, and
then, at the last moment, changed her mind."  He explained the cause of
their severance--an outcropping ridge of rock, not above a mile in
length; but it served, deflecting the one stream to the southward, the
other to north of east, so that they reached the ocean a good twenty
leagues apart.

He showed a map and told Sir Oliver further that at the narrowest point
between the two rivers there dwelt a couple of brothers, Dave and Andy
M'Lauchlin, with their households and long families, of whom all the
boys were expert log-drivers, like their fathers.  They were likewise
expert boatmen, and for money, no doubt, if Sir Oliver desired, would
navigate the upper reaches of either stream for him.  Of these reaches
the old man could tell little save that their currents ran moderately--
"nothing out of the way."  The M'Lauchlins sent all their timber down to
sea by the more northerly stream.  "Our river 'd be the better by far,
three-fourths of its way, but--" with a jerk of his thumb--"the Gap,
yonder, makes it foolishness."

Sir Oliver asked many questions, studying the map; and ended by
borrowing it.


He had it spread on his knee when Ruth came out of the cabin for the
last time, having said farewell to her household gods.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"A map." He folded it away hastily.

"And I am not to see it?"

"Some day.  Some day, if the owner will sell, you shall have it framed,
with our travels marked out upon it.  But, just now, it holds a small
secret."

She questioned him no further.  "Come," she said, "reach your arm in at
the window and draw the bolt, and afterwards we will pull the shutter
and nail it.  Are you going inside for a last look around?"

He laughed.  "Why?  The knapsacks are here, ready."

"Our home!"

"I take the soul of it with me, taking you."

It was prettily said.  Yet perversely she remembered how he had once
spoken of Margaret Dance, saying, "Let the dead bury their dead."

The sky, after six angry days--two sullen, four tempestuous--was clear
again and promised another stretch of fair weather.  This was
important, for they counted on having to sleep a night in the open
before reaching the M'Lauchlins' camp.  Old Strongtharm had told Sir
Oliver of a cave at the head of the pass and directed him how to find
it.  Should the sky's promise prove false, they would descend back to
the hut.  Snow was their one serious peril.


They carried but the barest necessaries; for although the worst of the
falls lay below and behind them, the upper part of the Gap was arduous
enough, and the more difficult for being unknown; also Sir Oliver had
old Strongtharm's assurance that the M'Lauchlins would furnish them with
all things requisite for voyaging by water.

Sir Oliver climbed in silence.  He was flinging a bridge, albeit a short
one, across the unknown, and the risk of it weighed on him.  For himself
this would have counted nothing, but he was learning the lesson common
to all male animals whose mates for the first time travel beside them.
As for Ruth, it was wonderful--the course of the path once turned, the
small home left out of sight--how securely she breasted the upward path.
Her lover and she were as gods walking, treading the roof of the world.

Through thickets they climbed, and by stairways beside the singing
falls.  In a pool below one of these falls they surprised a great loon
that had resorted here to live solitary through his moulting-season.
He rose and winged away with a cry like an inhuman laugh; and they
recognised a sound which had often been borne down the gorge--once or
twice at night, to awake and puzzle them.

They came to the uppermost fall a good hour before sunset, and after a
little search Sir Oliver found the cave.  They could have pushed on, but
decided to sleep here: and they slept soundly, being in truth more weary
than their spirits, exhilarated in the high air, allowed them to guess.

They might, as it turned out, by forcing the march, have found the
M'Lauchlins' settlement before dusk.  For scarcely had they travelled
five miles next morning before they came on an outpost of it: a large
hut, half dwelling-house, half boat-shed.  It stood in a clearing on the
left shore, and close by the water's edge was a young man, patching the
bottom of an upturned canoe.  Two children--a boy and a girl--had
dropped their play to watch him.  A flat-bottomed boat lay moored to the
bank, close by.

The children, catching sight of our travellers, must have uttered some
exclamation; for the young man turned quickly, and after a brief look
called "Good-morning."  There was a ford (he shouted) fifty yards
upstream; but no need to wade.  Let them wait a minute and he would
fetch them.

He laid down his tools, unmoored the flat-bottomed boat, and poled
across.  On the way back he told them that he was Adam M'Lauchlin, son
of David.  The little ones were children of his father by a second wife;
but he had seven brothers and sisters of his own. . . . Yes, their
settlement stood by the other river; at no great distance.  "If you'll
hark, maybe you can hear the long saws at work. . . ."

He led them to it, the small children bringing up the rear of the
procession.  The _Z'm--Z'm_ of the saws grew loud in Ruth's ears before
crossing the ridge she spied the huts between the trees--a congregation
of ten or a dozen standing a little way back from a smooth-flowing
river.  Between the huts and the river were many saw-pits, with men at
work.

At young Adam's hail the men in view desisted, quite as though he had
sounded the dinner horn.  Heads of others emerged from the pits.
Within a minute there was a small crowd gathered, of burly fellows
diffusing the fragrance of pine sawdust, all stamped in their degrees
with the M'Lauchlin family likeness, and all eager to know the
strangers' business.

Sir Oliver explained that he wanted a boat and two strong guides, to
explore the upper waters.  He would pay any price, in moderation.

"Ay," said their spokesman.  He wore a magnificent iron-grey beard
powdered with saw-dust; and he carried a gigantic pair of shoulders, but
rheumatism had contracted them to a permanent stoop.  "Ay, I'm no
fearin' about the pay.  You'll be the rich man, the Collector from
Boston."

Ruth was startled.  She had supposed herself to be travelling deep into
the wilderness.  She had yet to learn that in the wilderness, where men
traffic in little else, they exchange gossip with incredible energy--
talk it, in fact, all the time.  In those early colonial days the
settlers overleapt and left behind them leagues of primeval forest, to
all appearance inviolate.  But the solitude was no longer virgin.  Where
foot of man had once parted the undergrowth the very breath of the wind
followed and threaded its way after him, bearing messages to and fro.

"I'm no speirin'," said the oldster cautiously.  "But though our lads
have never been so far, there's talk of a braw house buildin'."

Here, somewhat hastily, Sir Oliver took him aside, and they spent twenty
minutes or so in converse together.  Ruth waited.

He came back and selected young Adam, with a cousin of his--a taciturn
youth, by name Jesse, son of Andrew--to be their boatman.  Five or six
of the young men were evidently eager to be chosen; but none disputed
his choice.  Rome, which reaches everywhere, reigned in the forest here;
its old law of family unquestioned and absolute.  The two youths swung
off to pack and provision the canoe.  An hour later they reported that
all was ready; and by three in the afternoon the voyagers were on their
way up-stream.


The voyage lasted four days and was seldom laborious; for the river ran
in long loops through the table-land, and with an easy current.
But here and there shallow runs of rock made stairways for it from one
level to another, and each of these miniature rapids compelled a
portage; so that towards the end of the second day the young men had
each a red shoulder spot chafed by the canoe's weight.

They camped by night close beside the murmuring water, ate their supper
beside a fire of boughs, slept on piled leaves beneath a tent of canvas
stretched over a long ridge-pole.  The two young men had a separate and
similar tent.

For two days the forest hemmed them in so closely that although frost
had half-stripped the deciduous trees, the eye found few vistas save
along the river ahead.  On either hand was drawn a continuous curtain of
mossed stems and boughs overlapping and interlacing their delicate
twigs.  Scarcely a bird sang within the curtain; scarcely a woodland
sound broke in upon the monotonous plash of the paddles.  Alder, birch,
maple, pine, spruce, and hemlock--the woods were a lifeless tapestry.
Ahead curved and stretched the waterway, rippled now and again by a
musk-rat crossing, swimming with its nose and no more above water.

A little before noon on the third day they emerged from this forest upon
a wide track of burnt land; and certain hills of which the blue summits
had for some hours been visible above the tree-tops on their right, now
took shape from the base up, behind thin clumps of birch, poplar, and
spruce--all of them (but the spruce especially) ragged and stunted in
growth.  For the rest this burnt land resembled a neglected pasture,
being carpeted for the most part with moss and blueberry.  A mysterious
blight lay over all, and appeared to extend to the foot of the hills.

All through the afternoon the chine of these hills closed the landscape;
purpled at times by passing clouds, at times lit up by sun-rays that
defined every bush and seam on the slopes.  All through the afternoon
the folded gullies between the slopes unwound themselves interminably,
little by little, as the voyagers traced up the river, paddling almost
due southward, along its loops and meanders.

But by nightfall they had turned the last spur of the range, and the
next morning opened to them a vastly different landscape: an undulating
country, wooded like a park, with hills indeed, but scattered ones to
the south and west, and behind the hills the faint purple dome of a
far-distant mountain, so faintly seen that at first Ruth mistook it for
a cloud.

She could not tell afterwards--though she often asked herself the
question--at what point the landscape struck her as being strangely
familiar.  Yet she was sure that the recognition came to her suddenly.
Sir Oliver since the morning's start had been indisposed to talk.
From time to time he drew out his map and consulted it.  The M'Lauchlin
lads, on the other hand, seemed to be restless.  During the halt for the
midday meal they drew aside together and Ruth heard them conversing in
eager whispers.

Possibly this stirred some expectation in her, which passed into
surmise, into certainty.  Late in the afternoon she drew in the paddle
she had been plying, laid it across the canoe, and called softly,--

"Oliver!"

He turned.  She was pointing to a hill now full in view ahead of them.

"That cliff . . . you remember--the eagles?"

He laughed as though the question amused him.

"It is very like.  Yes, certainly, it is very like.  But wait until we
open the clump of trees yonder. . . ."

They opened it, and her heart gave a leap.  A moment before she had been
sure this was the very hill.  His laugh had confirmed it. . . .
She remembered how, at the foot of it, just such a river as this looped
itself through the plain. . . . But, lo! in the opening gap, inch by
inch, a long building displayed itself: a mansion, gleaming white, with
a pillared front and pillared terraces, rising--terrace on terrace--from
the woodland, into which a cascade of water, spouting half-way down the
slope, plunged and was lost.

She sat dumb.  His eyes were upon her; and he laughed quietly.

"It is yours--as you commanded.  See!"

He flung out a hand to the left.  She beheld a clearing--an avenue, that
ran like a broad ribbon to the summit of a flat-topped rise.

"You demanded sight of the ocean," he was saying, and his voice seemed
to lose itself in the beat of the churning paddles.  "We cannot see it
from here; but from the house--_your_ house--you shall look on it every
day.  Did you not bid me remove a mountain?"


For the rest of the way she sat as in a dream.  One of the M'Lauchlin
lads had produced a cow-horn and was blowing it lustily. . . .
They came to shore by river-stairs of stone, where two servants in the
Vyell livery stood like statues awaiting them.

It was falling dusk when Sir Oliver disembarked and gave her his hand.
The men-servants, who had bent to hold the canoe steady as she stepped
ashore, drew themselves erect and again touched foreheads to their lord
and lady.

Still as in a dream, her arm resting within her lover's, she went up the
broad stairways from terrace to terrace.  Above her the long facade was
lit with window after window blazing welcome.

At the head of the perron, under the colonnaded portico, other tall
men-servants stood in waiting, mute, deferential.  She passed between
their lines into a vast entrance hall, and there, almost as her foot
crossed its threshold, across the marbled floor little Miss Quiney came
running a-flutter, inarticulate, with reaching hands.

Ruth drew back, almost with a cry.  But before she could resist, Tatty's
arms were about her and Tatty's lips lifted, pressed against either
cheek.  She suffered the embrace.

"My darling Ruth!--at last!"  Then with a laugh, "And in what strange
clothes! . . . But come--come and be arrayed!"  She caught Ruth's cold
hand and led her towards the staircase.  "Nay, never look about you so:
your eyes will not take in a tenth of all the wonders!"


Later, as an Indian gong sounded below, he came from his dressing-room
into the great bride-chamber where she stood, arrayed in satin, before
her mirror, hesitating as her fingers touched one after another of the
jewels scattered on the dressing-table under the waxen lights.  Her maid
slipped away discreetly.

"Well?" he asked.  He was resplendent in a suit of sapphire velvet, with
cravat and ruffles of old Spanish lace.  "Is my love content with
her home-coming?"

She crossed her arms slowly.

"You are good to me," she said.  "You do me too great honour, my lord."

He laughed, and catching up a necklace of diamonds from the
dressing-table, looped it across her throat, clasped it, leaned over her
shoulder and kissed her softly between the ear and the cheek's delicate
round.  Their eyes met in the mirror.

"I invited the Quiney," he said gaily, "to give you a feeling of home
among these strange faces.  She will not dine with us, though, unless
you choose."

"Let us be alone, to-night!" she pleaded.

"So be it. . . . But you shiver: you are cold.  No?  Then weary,
perhaps--yes, and hungry.  I've a backwoods hunger, for my part.
Let us go down and dine."




BOOK IV.




LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.




Chapter I.


BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.



_From Batty Langton, Esquire, to the Hon.  Horatio Walpole_.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS,
January 21st, 1748.

. . . . . You ask me, my dear Sir, why I linger on year by year in this
land of Cherokees and Choctaws, as you put it, at the same time hinting
very delicately that now, with my poor old father in his grave and my
own youthful debts discharged, you see no enduring reason for this
exile.  It is kind of you to be so solicitous: kinder still to profess
that you yet miss me.  But that I am missed at White's is more than you
shall persuade me to believe.  In an earlier letter, written when the
Gaming Act passed, you told me they were for nailing up an escutcheon to
mourn the death of play; they nailed up none for me.  And I gather that
play has recovered, and Dick Edgcumbe holds my cards.  I doubt if I
could endure to revisit St. James's--save by moonlight perhaps.
_Rappelez-moi_ to the waiters.  They will remember me.

But in good deed, dear Sir, what should I be doing at home among the
Malvern Hills upon a patrimony of 800 pounds?--for to that it has
dwindled.  Can I hoe turnips, or poke a knowledgeable finger into the
flanks of beeves?  I wonder if your literary explorations ever led you
across the furrow of an ancient ploughman who--

--on a May morning, on Malvern hills

was weary of wandering and laid him down to sleep beside a brook--having
been chased thither betimes, no doubt, by a nagging bedfellow.
I have no wife, nor mean to take one, and find it more to my comfort to
sleep here by the River Charles and dream of Malvern, secure that I
shall wake to find myself detached from it by half a world.

Yet your last letter touched me closely; for it happens that Sir O. V.,
for love of whom rather than for any better reason I have kept this
exile, has taken to himself a Lady.  That, you'll say, should be my
dismissal; and that I like her, as she appears willing to be friends
with me, gives me, you'll say again, no excuse to linger.  Yet I do, and
shall.

As for her history, Vyell picked her up in a God-forsaken fishing town,
some leagues up the coast; brought her home; placed her under
gouvernante and tutors; finally espoused her.  Stay: finally he has
built a palace for her, "Eagles" by name, whither he forces all Boston
to pay its homage.  For convenience of access to the goddess he has cut
a road twenty feet broad through the woodlands of her demesne.

The palace in a woody vale they found,
High-raised, of stone--

or, to speak accurately, of stone and timber combined.  Be pleased to
imagine a river very much like that of Richmond, but covered with grey
crags.  "Fie," you will say, "the site is savage, then, like all else in
this New World?"  My dear sir, you were never more mistaken.
Mr. Manley's young eye of genius fastened upon it at once, to adapt it
to a house and gardens in the Italian style.

Have I mentioned this Mr. Manley in former letters?  He is a young
gentleman of good Midland blood (his county, I believe, Bedfordshire),
with a moderate talent for drinking, a something more than talent for
living on his friends, and a positive genius for architecture.
He will have none of your new craze for Gothic.  Palladio is his god,
albeit he allows that Palladio had feet of clay, and corrects him
boldly--though always, as he tells me, with help of his minor deities,
Vignola and the rest, who built the great villas around Rome.  He has
studied in Italy, and tells me that at Florence he was much beholden to
your friend Mann, who, I dare swear, lost money by the acquaintance.

Vyell, his present patron, takes him out and shows him the site.
"Italy!" exclaims the Youth of Genius.  "Italy?" echoes Maecenas,
astonished.  "We'll make it so," says the Youth.  "These terraces, this
spouting water, these pines to serve us for cypresses!"  "But, my good
sir, the House?" cries the impatient Vyell.  "A fig for your house!
Any fool can design a house when the Almighty and an artist together
have once made the landscape for it.  Grant me two years for the
gardens," he pleads.  "You shall have ten months to complete landscape,
house, everything."  "I shall need armies of workmen."  "You shall have
them."  The Youth groaned.  "I shall have to be sober for ten months on
end!"  "What of that?" says V.  Lovers are unconscionable.

Well, the Youth sits down to his plans, and at once orders begin to fly
across ocean to this port and that for the rarest marbles--_rosso
antico_ from Mount Taenarus, _verde antico_ from Thessally; with green
Carystian, likewise shipped from Corinth; Carrara, Veronese Orange,
Spanish _broccatello_, Derbyshire alabaster, black granite from Vyell's
Cornish estate, red and purple porphyries from high up the Nile. . . .
The Youth conjures up his gardens as by magic.  Here you have a terrace
fenced with columns; below it a cascade pouring down a stairway of
circular basins--the hint of it borrowed from Frascati (from the Villa
Torlonia, if I remember); there an alley you'd swear was Boboli dipping
to rise across the river, on a stairway you'd swear as positively was
Val San Zibio.  Yet all is congruous.  The dog scouts the Villa d'Este
for a "toy-shop."

The house at first disappoints one, being straight and simple to the
last degree.  ("D----n me," says he, "what can you look for, in ten
months?")  It is of two storeys, the windows of the upper storey loftier
by one-third than those beneath; and has for sole ornament a balustraded
parapet broken midway by an Ionic portico of twelve columns, with a
_loggia_ deeply recessed above its entrance door.  To this portico a
flight of sixteen steps conducts you from the uppermost terrace.

Such is Vyell's new pleasance of Eagles, Boston's latest wonder.  I have
described it at this length because you profess to take more interest in
houses than in women; and also, to tell the truth, be cause I am shy of
describing Lady V.  To call her roundly the loveliest creature I have
ever set eyes on, or am like to, is (you will say) no description,
though it may argue me in love with her.

On my honour, no! or only as all others are in love--all the men, I
mean, and even some pro portion of the womankind.  The rest agree to
call her "Lady Good-for-Nothing," upon a double rumour, of which one
half is sad truth, and the other (my life on it) false as hell.

They have heard that when Vyell found her she was a serving-girl,
undergoing punishment (a whipping, to be precise) for some trumpery
offence against the Sabbath.  Yes, my dear sir, this is true; as it is
true also that Vyell, like a knight-errant of old, offered to share her
punishment, and did indeed share it to the extent of sitting in the
stocks beside her.  You'd have thought an honest mind might find food
for compassion in this, and even an excuse to believe the better of
human nature; but it merely scandalises these Puritan tabbies.
They fear Vyell for his wealth and title; and he, despising them, forces
them to visit her.

Now for the falsehood.  The clergyman who read the marriage ceremony for
V. somewhere in the backwoods (this, too, was his whim, and they have to
be content with it) is a low-bred trencher-chaplain, by name Silk.
He should have been unfrocked the next week, not for performing a
function apostolically derived, but for spreading a report--I wait to
fasten it on him--that before marriage she was no better than she should
be.  I have earned better right than any other man to know Vyell, and I
know it to be calumny.  But the wind blows, and the name
"Lady Good-for-Nothing" is a by-breath of it.

Vyell guesses nothing of this.  He has a masculine judgment and no small
degree of wit--though 'tis of a hard intellectual kind; but through
misprising his fellow creatures he has come to lack _flair_.  His lady,
if she scent a taint on the wind wafted through her routs and
assemblies, no doubt sets it down to breathings upon her humble origin,
or (it may be) even to some leaking gossip of her foregone wrong.
(Women, my dear sir, are brutes to rend a wounded one of the herd.)  She
can know nothing of the worse slander.

She moves through her duties as hostess with a pretty well-bred grace,
and a childishness infinitely touching.  Yet something more protects
her; a certain common sense, which now and then very nearly achieves
wit.  For an instance--But yesterday a certain pompous lady lamented to
her in my hearing (and with intention, as it seemed to me, who am grown
suspicious), the rapid moral decay of Boston society.  "Alas!" sighs my
heroine; "but what a comfort, ma'am, to think that neither of us belongs
to it!"  Add to this that she has learning enough to equip ten
_precieuses_--and hides it: has read Plato and can quote her Virgil by
the page--but forbears.  Yet all this while you have suspected me, no
doubt, of raving over a '_Belle Sauvage_, a Pocahontas.

Well, I shall watch her progress. . . . I have become so nearly a part
of Vyell that I charge myself to stand for him and supply what he lacks.
He loves her; she loves him to doting; but I cannot see into their
future.

Vyell, by the way, charges me to request your good offices with Mr. Mann
to procure him a couple of Tuscan vases.  I know that your friend is
infinitely obliging to all who approach him through you: and this
request which my letter carries as a tag should have been its pretext,
as in fact it was its occasion.  Adieu! my dear sir.

Yours most sincerely,

BAT. LANGTON.



Chapter II.


SIR OLIVER SAILS.


Mr. Langton was right.  Theologians, preaching mysteries, are
helpless before the logical mind until they abandon defence and
boldly attack their opponents' capital incapacity, saying, "Precisely
because you insist upon daylight, you miss discovering the stars."
The battle is a secular one, and that sentence contains the reason,
too, why it will never be ended in this world.  But the theologians
may strengthen their conviction, if not their argument, by noting how
often the more delicate shades of human feeling will oppose
themselves to the logical mind as a mere wall of blindness.

Oliver Vyell loved his bride as passionately as his nature, hardened
by his past, allowed him.  To the women who envied her, to the
gossips and backbiters, he opposed a nescience inexpugnable,
unscalable as a wall of polished stone: but the mischief was, he
equally ignored her sensitiveness.

Being sensitive, she understood the hostile shadows better than the
hard protecting fence.  To noble natures enemies are often nearer
than friends, and more easily forgiven.

But Mr. Langton was also right in guessing her ignorant of the
rumours set going by Silk, who, as yet, had whispered falsehoods
only.  The worst rumour of all--the truth--was beyond his courage.

Ruth loved her lord devoutly.  To love him was so easy that it seemed
no repayment of her infinite debt.  She desired some harder task; and
therefore, since he laid this upon her, she--who would have chosen a
solitude to be happy in--rejoiced to meet these envious ladies with
smiles, with a hundred small graces of hospitality; and still her
bliss swallowed up their rancour, scarcely tasting its gall.  He
(they allowed) was the very pattern of a lover.

He was also a model man of business.  Even from his most flagrant
extravagances, as Batty Langton notes in another epistle, he usually
contrived to get back something like his money's worth.
He would lend money, or give it, where he chose: but to the man who
overreached him in a money bargain he could be implacable. Moreover,
though a hater of quarrels, he never neglected an enmity he had once
taken up, but treated it with no less exactitude than a business
account.

Their happiness had endured a little more than three months when, one
morning, he entered Ruth's morning-room with a packet of letters in
his hand.  He was frowning, not so much in wrath, as in distaste of
what he had to tell.

"Dear," he said brusquely, bending to kiss her, "I have ill news.  I
must go back to England, on business."

"To England ?" she echoed.  Her wrists were laid along the arms of
her chair, and, as she spoke, her fingers clutched sharply at the
padding.  She was not conscious of it.  She was aware only that
somehow, at the back of her happiness this shadow had always lurked;
and that England lay across the seas, at an immense distance. . . .

He went on--his tone moody, but the words brief and distinct.
"For a few months, only; five or six, perhaps; with any luck, even
less. That infernal aunt of mine--"

"Lady Caroline ?"  She asked it less out of curiosity than as a
prompter gives a cue; for he had come to a full stop.  She was
wondering how Lady Caroline could injure him, being so far
away. . . .

He laughed savagely, yet--having broken his news, or the worst of
it--with something of relief.  "She shall smart for it--if that