coe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that you will be
vis-a-vis to his excellency?" She lightly beat the air with her whip,
while I took a good look at the charming scene.

Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant. He understood too
well the source of such gay social banter. He knew it covered a hurt. He
said to her: "Is this Ruth Devlin or another?"

And she replied very gravely: "It is Ruth Devlin and another too," and
she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes
were troubled.

He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but,
after a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he
came. "And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?"
she said; "and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and
field?"

His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch
of mock irony: "The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of
the house of Devlin."

"Oh," she said, "you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished
satire on a woman." And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with
which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had
ever happened to her.

"No, indeed no," he replied, "though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am
malicious--just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: 'Rome turned
upon itself.'"

"But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of
it. Yours did not seem applied to yourself," was her slow answer, and
she seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.

"No?" Then he said with a playful sadness: "A moment ago you were not
completely innocent of irony, were you?"

"But a man is big and broad, and should not--he should be magnanimous,
leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things, to be
guilty of littlenesses. But see how daring I am--speaking like this
to you who know so much more than I do.... Surely, you are still only
humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself--the irony so icy
to your friends?"

She had developed greatly. Her mind had been sharpened by pain. The
edge of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and
allusive. Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her
had been achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion
came, Ruth had awakened sharply to