The man opposite rose slowly, came slowly to her, bent slowly and kissed her. "I ask your pardon if I was rough with you this evening, Ruth," he said. "But Alf!--he fairly maddens me. I feel to him as you shouldn't feel to any human being, let alone your own brother. You know what he's after?" he continued. She stirred and coloured, as she lifted her eyes to his, dark with an unusual tenderness. "Reckon so, Ern," she said. He stood before the fire, for once almost handsome in his vehemence. "Layin his smutty hands on you!" he said. That little scene, with its suggestion of passion suppressed, steadied Ruth.... And it was time. That Other was always drawing nearer. And as she felt his approach, the savage power of him, his fierce virility, and was conscious of the reality of the danger, she resolved to meet it and fend it off. He should save Ernie instead of destroying her. And the way was clear. If this new intellectual life, the seeds of which the engineer had been sowing so patiently for so long in the unkempt garden of Ernie's spirit became a reality for him, a part of himself, growing in such strength as to strangle the weeds of carelessness, he was saved--so much Ruth saw. "Once he was set alight to, all his rubbish'd go up in a flare, and he'd burn bright as aflame," she told the engineer once seizing her chance; and ended on the soft note of the turtle-dove--"There's just one could set him ablaze--and only one. And that's you, Joe." At the moment Joe was sitting before the fire in characteristic attitude, hands deep in his pockets, legs stretched out, the toes of his solid boots in the air. For a moment he did not answer. It was as though he had not heard. Then he turned that slow, bull-like glare of his full on her. "A'm to save him that he may enjoy you--that's it, is it?" he said. "A'm to work ma own ruin." It was the first time he had openly declared himself. Now that it had come she felt, like many another woman in such case, a sudden instant revulsion. Her dreams blew away like mist at the discharge of cannon. She was left with a sense of shock as one who has fallen from a height. At the moment of impact she was ironing, and glad of it. Baring her teeth unconsciously she pressed hard down on the iron with a little hiss. "You've no call to talk to me like that, Joe. It's not right." Deliberately he rose and turned his back. "A don't know much," he growled in his chest, "but A do know that then." Her heart thumped against her ribs. "I thart you were straight, Joe," she said. He warmed his hands at the blaze; and she knew he was grinning, and the nature of the grin. "A thought so maself till A found A wasn't," he answered. "No man knows what's in him till he's tried--that's ma notion of it. Then he'll have a good few surprises, same as A've done. A man's a very funny thing when he's along of a woman he loves--that's ma experience."