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
console you?"

"Is it on my account?"

"Only, as I guess, in so far as she accuses you of having played the
devil with her plan for marrying me up with my cousin Di'? If Di'
had been the last woman in the world. . . . But the old harridan
never spoke to me after the grooming I gave her that morning at
Natchett. 'Faith, and I did treat her to some plain talk!" he wound
up with another laugh.

"But what harm can she do you?"

He explained that his late un