mulate him. You call yourself
boorish and clownish. Try and improve yourself; and then, perhaps, you
will not feel so much inferior to your brother."

As I have said before, no one cares to hear another say what in
self-disparaging moments he often says about himself. A dozen times in
the last fortnight had I spoken of myself as inferior to my brother,
but for another to say it was wormwood and gall to me.

"Copy my brother!" I said, savagely. "Be a soft-fingered coward like
him! To be afraid of my own shadow like him! Copy him! Why he is but
a mere woman disgracing the clothes he wears. Had I been a puny thing
like him I should have ran away just as he did, and left you to die on
yon rocks. And yet you talk of my copying him. Why, he's just a
soft-muscled contemptible coward."

"I scarcely know which I like less," she cried, "a coward--although I
don't admit that your brother is one--or one who boasts of his own
bravery and taunts you with his own kind deeds. Roger, do you think
because you cannot appreciate your brother's nobleness that it does not
exist?"

This silenced me. I had been answered. She had championed my brother.
She had declared in so many words that she preferred him to me. She
regarded what I had done for her as nothing.

I found then that my passion had been inflamed by hope, that my
jealousy was due to this reason. No sooner did Ruth speak in the way I
have described than a dull despair laid hold of my heart, and I was
dumb. I could see now that she loved Wilfred, and that she saw
nobility in him, which, in her opinion my nature was too poor to see,
that the fact of my having saved her life was to her little more than
the action of an animal, who acted instinctively without a thought of
danger. Well, on the whole I was glad to know the worst. I knew how
to act now, I was not upheld by any false hope.

"I am glad you have told me this, Ruth," I said quietly. "It is best
that I should know. I am afraid I have behaved very rudely! forgive me
and you shall have no reason to complain again."

She clutched my arm tightly, and seemed about to protest, but I did not
allow her to speak.

"It was mean and unmanly of me to say what I have," I said, "but I was
excited and almost beside myself; let us walk more rapidly towards
home."

At this Ruth looked at my face as if in surprise, and began to speak.

"I hope I have not hurt your feelings, Roger, but I--that is----"

"Pray, do