had been used to laugh. Ruth had always supposed,
for example, that the presumption of instructing the Deity in
appropriate conduct was impossible even to second-rate minds until by
imitation slowly acquired as a habit. It was monstrous to her that
he should so suddenly and all unconsciously be guilty of it.
Indeed for the moment these small evidences of the change in him
distressed her more than the change itself, which she had yet to
realise; just as in company a solecism of speech or manners will make
us wince before we have time to trace it to the ill-breeding from
which it springs. His mother, she had heard (he, in fact, had told
her), was given to these pious tricks of speech. Surely his fine
brain had suffered some lesion. He was not himself, and she must
wait for his recovery. But surely, too, he would recover and be
himself again.

"Ruth, I have done you great wrong."

"O cease! cease, Oliver!" Her voice cried it aloud now, as she
dropped to her knees and buried her face in the coverlet. "Do not
talk like this--I had a hundred times rather you neglected me than
hear you talk so! _You_ have done me evil? _You_, my lord, my love?
You, who saved me? You, in whose eyes I have found grace, and in
that my great, great happiness? You, in whose light my life has
moved? . . . Ah, love, do not break my heart!"

"You misunderstand," he said quietly. "Why should what I am saying
break your heart? I am asking you to marry me."

She rose from her knees very slowly and went to the window.
Standing there, again she battled off the temptation to laugh wildly.
. . . She fought it down after a minute, and turned to encounter his
gaze, which had not ceased to rest on her as she stood with her
beautiful figure silhouetted against the evening light.

"You really think my marrying you would make a difference?"

"To me it would make all the difference," he urged, but still very
gently, as one who, sure of himself, might reason with a child.
"I doubt if I shall recover, indeed, until this debt is paid."

"A debt, Oliver? What kind of debt?"

"Why, of gratitude, to be sure. Did you not win me back from
death?--to be a new and different man henceforth, please God!"

Upon an excuse she left him and went to her own sleeping tent.
It stood a little within the royal garden of Belem and (the weather
being chilly) the guard of the gate usually kept a small brazier
alight for her. This evening for some reason he ha