He half filled a glass and swallowed it at a draught. ‘I’m better now,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me any questions, there’s a good girl. I’m going to bed for an hour or two. I shall be all right directly.’ He seemed to avoid her gaze. He wanted to get away from her, and, with a woman’s quick instinct, she saw it. She let him go, and then she fell on her knees, and, with tears streaming down her cheeks, she sobbed out a prayer to God to watch over and protect her husband, and to let no black shadows come to mar their lives—lives that had been so happy until now. The squire came down to luncheon, but he was still white and restless. He answered Gertie and his wife haphazard, and evidently did not know what he said. That afternoon, for the first time in their married life, Ruth saw her husband drunk. He had stupified himself with brandy, and had fallen into a drunken sleep. She had gone to him in his study to ask him a question, and there she found him dozing fitfully, with the empty bottle by his side. He heard her footsteps, but did not recognize her. Without opening his eyes, he addressed her as though she was some one else. He cursed her and called her horrible names. Then suddenly he leapt up, his bloodshot eyes starting from his head, and struggled with an imaginary foe. ‘It’s your own fault, curse you!’ he cried. ‘Drown, like the dog that you are!’ Then he fell back heavily into his chair, and Ruth, alarmed, rushed out and called for help. He was in a fit. The doctor came, and was astonished. ‘The brain is affected,’ he said. ‘Some terrible shock has unnerved him. He must be kept quite quiet and watched.’ That night Ruth sat and watched by the bedside of a delirious husband. And in his delirium the horrible secrets of his life were told. Secrets so horrible, things so vile and unholy, that the woman who bore his name raised her despairing eyes to heaven, and cried to God passionately to close the madman’s self-condemning lips. It was a fortnight before the squire came round again, and then he was the wreck of his former self. Weak and ill, he would wander about in the air for an hour or two a day, leaning on his wife’s arm, and uttering never a sound. Ruth, too, had changed. Her beautiful face was deeply lined, and her eyes were sunken. ‘She’s fretting about the master,’ said the servants. They did not know that she was crushing down in her heart the ghastly secret that chance had revealed to her. Under that awful knowledge, slowly but surely her heart was breaking. And yet knowing all—having heard every awful word that had fallen from this man in his delirium—she loved him still, loved him as fondly as ever, and would have laid down her life to save him from one moment’s pain.