, you see, that you marry me.
. . . Ruth, you confess that you were wrong, for the child's sake.
He is dead; and, on the whole, so much the better, poor mite!
But for another, should another be born--"

"There would be time," she said quietly. "But we shall never have
another."

She had hardened strangely. It was as if the milk of motherhood,
wasting in her, had packed itself in a crust about her heart.
He loved her; she never ceased to love him; but whereas under the
public scourge something had broken, letting her free of opinion, to
love the good and hate the evil for their own sakes, under this
second and more mysterious visitation, she kept her courage indeed,
but certainty was hers no longer; nor was she any longer free of
opinion, but hardened her heart against it consciously, as against an
enemy.

Not otherwise can I account for the image of Ruth Josselin--my Lady
Vyell--Lady Good-for-Nothing--as under these various names it flits,
for the next few years, through annals, memoirs, correspondence,
scandalous chronicles; now vindicated, now glanced at with unseemly
nods and becks, anon passionately denounced; now purely shining, now
balefully, above and between the clouds of those times; but always a
star and an object of wonder.

"In all Massachusetts," writes the Reverend Hiram Williams, B.D., in
his tract entitled _A Shoe Over Edom_, "was no stronghold of Satan to
compare with that built on a slope to the rearward of Boston, by Sir
O--V--, Baronet. Here with a woman, born of this Colony, of passing
wit and beauty (both alike the dower of the Evil One), he kept house
to the scandal of all devout persons, entertaining none but professed
Enemies of our Liberties, Atheists, Gamesters." Here one may pause
and suspect the reverend castigator of confusing several dislikes in
one argument. It is done sometimes, even in our own day, by
religious folk who polemise in politics. "Cards they played on the
Sabbath. Plays they rehearsed too, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve
and others, whose names may guarantee their lewdness. . . . The
woman, I have said, was fair; but of that sort their feet go down
ever _to_ Hell. . . ."

"My Noll's _Belle Sauvage_," writes Langton to Walpole, "continues a
riddle. I shall never solve it; yet 'till I have solved it, expect
me not. 'Tis certain she loves him; and because she loves him, her
loyalty allows not hint of sadness even to me, his best friend.
Guess why she likes