“I used to think Ruth a good quiet girl, but since the trick she played me over her marriage I haven’t known what to think. I’ve lain awake o’ nights worrying over it. You’ve heard the whole tale from Mr. Malory. Gentle she was until then, and a good daughter to me, I must say, and then ... gone in a night withouten a sign, and never a word to me in explanation since. What’s a mother to make of that?” I could have laughed at the poor woman’s perplexity. I thought of the hen whose brood of ducklings takes suddenly to the water. “But has she never alluded to her ... her elopement?” “Never a word, I tell you. I asked her once, and she put on a look as black as night, and I never asked her again. I’ve sometimes wished Mr. Malory could speak to her, I’ve a fancy she might answer him freer; and yet I don’t know.” “I’ve never fully understood,” I said, wishing to make the most of my opportunity, “whether she cares at all for her husband or not?” “Small wonder that you haven’t understood,” said Mrs. Pennistan tartly, “when her own mother is kept out in the dark. It’s my belief she hates him, and it’s my knowledge that he ill-treats her, but at the same time it’s my instinct she loves him in a way. It sounds a hard thing to say of one’s child, but I’ve always held Ruth was a coarse, rough creature at times under her smoothness.” She instantly repented of her words. “There, what am I saying of my own kith and kin? I get mad when I get thinking of my girl, so you mustn’t lay too much store by my talk. Pennistan’d give it me if he heard me.” I persisted. “Then you think that, when she ran away with him, she hated him and loved him both together?” Mrs. Pennistan paused for a long time. “Well,” she said at last, “if you ask me what I think, it’s this. There was a deal more in that running away than any of us knew at the time. What it exactly was I don’t know even now. I doubt Ruth doesn’t know either, or if she does know, she doesn’t own to it, not to herself even. I doubt Rawdon knows most about it.” I saw another man becoming inevitable. “And Mr. Malory?” She shot at me a quick suspicious look. “You’re Mr. Malory’s friend, what do you know?” “I know nothing,” I said. “He didn’t know himself.” “No,” said Mrs. Pennistan suddenly, “that’s the truth. He didn’t know himself. He wasn’t a man to fancy those things. To me it was as plain as daylight, but Pennistan he always scoffed at me, and I daren’t speak it to Ruth, and I’ve thought since that maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe she went with Rawdon because she loved Rawdon: maybe she didn’t go, as I’ve sometimes thought, because she was afraid.... It’s hard, isn’t it, to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with them? Day in, day out, and you know little more of them than the clothes they wear and what they like to get to eat.” I was sorry for her. She went on,—