"I wonder," mused Ruth, "if somewhere in it there's a chapter would tell me why, when I lie awake and think of my lost one, 'tis his footsteps I listen for--feet that never walked!" "Hush ye, now. . . . Isn't it always their feet, the darlings! Don't the sound of it, more'n their voices, call me to door a dozen times a day? . . . I never bore child; but I made garments in hope o' one. Tell me, when you knitted his little boots, wasn't it different from all the rest?" "Ah, put them away!" "To be sure, dearie, to be sure--all ready for the next." "I shall never have another child." Mrs. Strongtharm smiled tolerantly. "Never," Ruth repeated; "never; I know it." With the same assurance of prophesy she answered her lover on his return, a bare two months later. "But you must have known. . . . Even your letters kept it secret. Yet, had you written, the next ship would have brought me. Surely you did not doubt _that?_" "No." "Then why did you not tell me?" It was the inevitable question. She had forestalled it so often in her thoughts that, when uttered at last, it gave her a curious sensation of re-enacting some long-past scene. "I thought you did not care for children." He was pacing the room. He halted, and stared at her in sheer astonishment. Many a beautiful woman touches the height of her beauty after the birth of her first child; and this woman had never stood before him in loveliness that, passing comprehension, so nearly touched the divine. But her perversity passed comprehension yet farther. "Do you call that an answer?" he demanded. "No. . . . You asked, and I had to say something; but it is no answer. Forgive me. It was the best I could find." He still eyed her, between wrath and admiration. "I think," she said, after a pause, "the true answer is just that I did wrongly--wrongly for the child's sake." "That's certain. And your own?" "My own? That does not seem to me to count so much. . . . Neither of us believe that a priest can hallow marriage; but once I felt that the touch of a certain one could defile it." "You have never before reproached me with that." "Nor mean to now. I chose to run from him; but, dear, I do not ask to run from the consequences." "The blackguard has had his pretty revenge. Langton told me of it. . . . All the prudes of Boston gather up their skirts, he says." "What matter? Are we not happier missing them? . . . Honester, surely, and by that much at any rate the happier." "Marry me, and I promise to force them all back to your feet." She laughed quietly, almost to herself, a little wearily. "Can you not see, my dear lord, that I ask for no such triumph? It is good of you--oh, I see how good!--to desire it for me. But did we want these people in our forest days?" "One cannot escape the world," he muttered. "What? Not when the world is so quick to cast one out?"