Ruth drew in her breath with the sound, almost a hiss, of a sword snatched from its scabbard. Then slowly she relaxed. "He's not got the sway over me not now," she said in a still voice, with lowered eyes. "Only thing he's the only one outside who knaws Captain Royal's the father of little Alice." Mrs. Trupp eyed her under level brows. "Oh, he does know that?" she said. Ruth was pale. "Yes, 'M," she said. "See Alf used to drive him that summer at the Hohenzollern." Mrs. Trupp was not entirely satisfied. "I don't see how Alfred can hold his knowledge over you," she remarked. "Not over me," answered Ruth, raising her eyes. "Over him." "Over who?" "Captain Royal," said Ruth; and added slowly--"And I'd be sorry for anyone Alf got into his clutches--let alone her father." Her dark eyes smouldered; her colour returned to her, swarthy and glowing; a gleam of teeth revealed itself between faintly parted lips. Mrs. Trupp not for the first time was aware of a secret love of battle and danger in this young Englishwoman whose staid veins carried the wild blood of some remote ancestress who had danced in the orange groves of Seville, watched the Mediterranean blue flecked with the sails of Barbary corsairs, and followed with passionate eyes the darings and devilries of her matador in the ring among the bulls of Andalusia. Mrs. Trupp returned home, unquiet at heart, and with a sense that somehow she had been baffled. She knew Ruth well enough now to understand how that young woman had fallen a prey to Royal. It was not the element of class that had been her undoing, certainly not the factor of money: it was the soldier in the man who had seized the girl's imagination. And Mrs. Trupp, daughter herself of a line of famous soldiers, recognised that Royal with all his faults, was a soldier, fine as a steel-blade, keen, thorough, searching. It was the hardness and sparkle and frost-like quality of this man with a soul like a sword which had set dancing the girl's hot Spanish blood. Royal was a warrior; and to that fact Ruth owned her downfall. Was Ernie a warrior too? Not for the first time she asked herself the question as she turned out of the Moot into Borough Lane. And at the moment the man of whom she was thinking emerged from the yard of the Transport Company, dusty, draggled, negligent as always, and smiling at her with kind eyes--too kind, she sometimes thought. As she crossed the road to the Manor-house Joe Burt passed her and gave his cap a surly hitch by way of salute. Mrs. Trupp responded pleasantly. Her husband, she knew, respected the engineer. She herself had once heard him speak and had admired the fire and fearlessness in him. Moreover, genuine aristocrat that she was, she followed with sympathy his lonely battle against the hosts of Toryism in the East-end, none the less because she was herself a Conservative by tradition and temperament. _That_ man was a warrior to be sure....