He urged her confidence, therefore, seeing that she remained silent, although her lips were still parted, her hand still lying on his hand, and the expectation still living in her eyes, that had not as yet remembered to follow the lead of her mind. They were the mirrors of her instinct, and her instinct was at variance with her reason. He had come down to the practical business of his mission, while she lived still in the enchanted moments of their flight into a realm to her unknown. If her ears received his emphatic words, her brain remained insensible to them. He detached his hand from hers, to lay it on her shoulder and to shake her slightly. “Ruth, do you hear what I am saying to you?” Her widened eyes contracted for an instant, as with pain, and turning them on him she prepared an expression of intelligent comprehension to greet his next sentence. “I am asking you to trust me as a friend. It’s lonely to be left alone with a decision. If you are angry with me for interfering, tell me to go away, and I will go. But so long as I may talk to you, I want to keep my finger on the pulse of your affairs, where it has been, let me remind you, ever since I set foot in your father’s house. I want to see you happy in your home, and to know that I accompanied you at any rate to the threshold.” She broke from him, he told me, with a cry; ran from him, and never reappeared that evening. On the following day she accepted Leslie Dymock. V “There was a great deal of rejoicing,” Malory continued, “in the Pennistan household over the engagement. Nancy and her husband came for a three days’ visit. I was glad to see my Daphnis and Chloe again, and to discover that all the sweets of marriage which I had described to Ruth were living realities in these two. They seemed insatiable for each other’s presence. Their attitude towards Ruth and Leslie was parental; nay, grandfatherly; nay, ancestral! Experience and patronage transpired through the cracks of their benison. Ruth was annoyed, but I was greatly amused. “It had been arranged that the wedding should take place almost immediately. Why delay? I am sure that Leslie Dymock was hungering to get his wife away to his own home. And Ruth? She accepted every happening with calm, avoided me—I supposed that she was shy, and left her to herself—was gentle and affectionate to Leslie, took a suitable interest in the preparations of her wedding. I was, on the whole, satisfied. I did not believe that she was much in love with Leslie Dymock, in fact I was inclined to think that she regretted her handsome blackguard, but I believed that her evident fondness for Dymock would develop with their intimacy, and that the bud would presently break out into the full-blown rose. “As for him, he would not have exchanged his present position with an archangel. “I asked Amos what had become of Westmacott. “‘Over at his place, like a wild beast in a cave,’ he replied with a grin.