serve her face.

"I would not speak of this before," he went on, still with his eyes
turned to the window, "because I wanted to think it all out. But it
is true, Ruth; I am a changed man."

"I hope not."

Again he did not hear, or he failed to heed. "Not," he pursued,
"that any amount of thinking could alter the truth. The mercy of God
has been revealed to me. When a man has been through such horrors--
lying there, with that infernal woman held to me--"

"Ah!" she interposed with a catch of the breath. "Do not curse her.
She was dead, poor thing!"

"I tell you that I cursed her as I cursed myself. . . . Yes, we both
deserved to die. She died with her teeth in my flesh--the flesh
whose desire was all we ever had in common."

"Yes . . . I knew."

"Have you the coat I wore?"

"It is folded away. Some boxes of clothes were saved from the house,
and I laid it away in one of them."

"Her teeth must have torn it?"

"Yes." Ruth would have moved away in sheer heart-sickness. Why would
he persist in talking thus?

"I shall always keep that coat. If ever I am tempted to forget the
mercy of God, the rent in that coat shall remind me."

She wanted to cry aloud, "Oh, cease, cease!" This new pietism of his
revolted her almost to physical sickness. She recognised in it the
selfishness she had too fatally learned to detect in all pietism.
"At least he had owed enough to his poor little fellow-sinner to
spare a thought of pity!" . . . But a miserable restraint held her
tongue as he went on--

"Yes, Ruth. God showed Himself to me in that hour; showed me, too,
all the evil of my past life. I had no hope to live; but I vowed to
Him then, if I lived, to live as one reformed."

He paused here, as if waiting for her to speak. She did not speak.
She felt her whole body stiffening; she wanted too to laugh outright,
scornfully. "The evil of his past life? Am I next to be expelled,
as a part of it? Is it up to _this_ he would lead? . . . God help
me, if there be a God!--that this should be the man I loved!"

"And another oath I swore," he went on solemnly: "to do what
compensation I may to any my sinning has injured. You are the chief
of these."

"I, Oliver?"

"You, who under Heaven were made, and properly, the means of saving
my life to repentance."

Somehow with this new piety he had caught the very phraseology and
intonation of its everyday professors, even those very tricks of bad
logic at which he