The colors were mixed again. Ruth, contrary to all previous conviction,
added light red to the Italian pink. The sketch had gone rapidly from
bad to worse, but the light red finished it off. It never, so to speak,
held up its head again; but I believe she has it still somewhere, put
away in a locked drawer in tissue-paper, as if it were very valuable.

"I did not come without a reason," said Charles, after a long pause,
speaking with difficulty. "It is no good beating about the bush. I want
to speak to you again about what I told you three weeks ago. Have you
forgotten what that was?"

Ruth shook her head. _She had not forgotten._ Her hand began to tremble,
and he sat down beside her on the bench, and, taking the brush out of
her hand, laid it in its box.

"Ruth," he said, gently, "I have not been very happy during the last
three weeks; but two days ago, when I saw you again, I thought you did
not look as if you had been very happy either. Am I right? Are you happy
in your engagement with--Quite content? Quite satisfied? Still silent.
Am I to have no answer?"

"Some questions have no answers," said Ruth, steadily, looking away from
him. "At least, the questions that ought not to be asked have none."

"I will not ask any more, then. Perhaps, as you say, I have no right.
You won't tell me whether you are unhappy, but your face tells me so in
spite of you. It told me so two days ago, and I have thought of it every
hour of the day and night since."

She gathered herself together for a final effort to stop what she knew
was coming, and said, desperately:

"I don't know how it is. I don't mean it, and yet everything I say to
you seems so harsh and unkind; but I think it would have been better not
to come here, and I think it would be better, better for us both, if you
would go away now."

Charles's face became set and very white. Then he put his fortune to the
touch.

"You are right," he said. "I will go away--for good; I will never
trouble you again, when you have told me that you do not love me."

The color rushed into her face, and then died slowly away again, even
out of the tightly compressed lips.

There was a long silence, in which he waited for a reply that did not
come. At last she turned and looked him in the face. Who has said that
light eyes cannot be impassioned? Her deep eyes, dark with the utter
blankness of despair, fell before the intensity of his. He leaned
towards her, and with gentle stren