At the moment her eyes fell on a card tied to the bed-post on which was written: _From Mr., Mrs. and Miss Trupp_. Ruth's eyes caressed the bed, and her fingers stroked the smooth wood. "It's like them," she said. "None o your cheap trash." "Ah," answered Ernie. "Trust them. They're just all right, they are." Before the looking-glass on the chest of drawers Ruth now took off her hat. She was perhaps too simple, too natural, too near to earth to be shy at this the supreme moment of a woman's life. At least she was too wary to show it. "Rich folks they have two little beds laid alongside, these days," she said, speaking from her experience as a maid. "I wouldn't think it was right myself. Only you mustn't judge others." She added in her slow way, as she patted her hair--"I wouldn't feel prarperly married like only in a prarper two-bed." Ernie drew down the blind. Then he marched upon his bride deliberately and with remorseless eyes. Suddenly she turned and met him with a swift and lovely smile, dropping her mask, and discovering herself to him in the surprising radiance of a moon that reveals its beauty after long obscurity. She laid her hands upon his shoulders in utter surrender. He gathered her gradually in his arms; and closing his eyes, dwelt on her lips with the slow and greedy passion of a bee, absorbed in absorption, and drinking deep in the cloistered seclusion of a fox-glove bell, "You're prarperly married all right," he said. "And you ca-a-n't get out of it--not no-ways." PART I DEEPENING DUSK CHAPTER I THE HOSTEL Dr. Trupp of Beachbourne, as he was generally known--Mr. Trupp, to give him his correct title--was a genuinely great man. His father had been a book-seller in Torquay; and he himself never lost the greater qualities of the class from which he sprang. He was very simple and very shrewd. Science had not blunted the fine intuitions which his brusque manner half concealed. Moreover, he trusted those intuitions perhaps unconsciously as do few men of his profession; and they rarely played him false. In early manhood his integrity, his sound common sense, and practical idealism had won for him the love of a singularly noble girl who might have married one of the best of her inevitably artificial class. Later in life indeed Evelyn Trupp often would amuse her father and annoy her mother by affirming that she was far prouder of being the wife of Mr. Trupp of Beachbourne than of having been Miss Moray of Pole. And she had good cause. For her husband was no longer the country doctor at whom the county families had sniffed. He was "Trupp of Beachbourne," whose fame had spread, quietly it is true, from Sussex, through England to the outer world. And if there was some difference of opinion as to whether Mr. Trupp had made Beachbourne, or Beachbourne had made him, there was no question that the growth of the town, and its deserved popularity as a health-resort was coincident with his residence there.