For the time being Ruth was glad to lie up, as a tigress in whelp, after long hunting, is content to harbour in the green darkness, drinking in draughts of refreshing through sleep, while her mate prowls out at dusk to find meat. But that would not last for ever. Her life must be full and brimming over or her insatiable vitality and that all-devouring spirit of hers, reaching out like a creeper to embrace the world, might find outlet in mischief, innocent enough in the intention, and yet, as experience had already proved, catastrophic in its consequences. In her secret deeps, indeed, Ruth was one to whom danger was the breath of life, although she was still unaware of it: an explorer and pioneer, gay and gallant, sailing her skiff over virgin oceans, reckless of the sunken reefs that might at any moment rip the bottom out of her frail craft. The outward sedateness of the Sussex peasant was liable at any moment to sudden overthrow, as some chance spark caused the southern blood in her veins to leap and frolic into flame; and that Castilian hidalgo, her remote ancestor, who lurked behind the arras of the centuries, called her away from the timid herd to some dear and desperate enterprise of romance. Mrs. Trupp alone was aware of this buccaneer quality hidden in the young woman's heart and undiscovered of the world. Ruth's Miss Caryll had told her friend of it long ago when the girl was in her service at the Dower-house, Aldwoldston. "It's the Spaniard in her," Miss Caryll had said. And when at the time of her distress Ruth had told her story to the wife of the great surgeon who had succoured her, Mrs. Trupp, keen-eyed for all her gentleness, had more than once detected the flash of a sword in the murk of the tragedy. The girl had dared--and been defeated. She would dare again--until she found her conqueror: thus Mrs. Trupp envisaged the position. Was Ernie that man? CHAPTER IV ALF Then a child lifted its tiny sail on the far horizon. Its rippling approach across the flood-tides absorbed Ruth and helped Ernie: for he had in him much of his father's mysticism, and was one of those men who go through life rubbing their eyes as the angels start up from the dusty road, and they see miracles on every side where others only find the prosaic permutations and combinations of mud. And this particular miracle, taking place so deliberately beneath his roof, a miracle of which he was the unconscious agent, inspired and awed him. "Makes you sweat to think of it," he said to a mate in the yard. "By then you've had half-a-dozen and got to keep em, you'll sweat less," retorted his friend, who had been married several years. Mr. Trupp looked after Ruth. Great man as he was now, he still attended faithfully those humble families who had supported him when first he had established himself in Old Town thirty years before, young, unknown, his presence fiercely resented by the older practitioners.