Yes, Dickie had certainly been lucky, and, like a wise man, he did not strain his star to another effort. The big thing--well, he had squared up to it--and, truth to say, he had been fearfully shaky and uncertain about his capacity to do so when Hal had first roused his pride in the matter. Now the little things again, the little beautiful things--he had earned them. Anyway, he could not have a newspaper in the house nowadays, for Ruth's sake--he owed it to Ruth to shut out for ever those cries of horror and fear and violence from the battering underworld. "What I love about the way we live, Dickie, is that the just-rightness of it all flows on evenly the whole time; one can be certain of it. Most people get it set aside for them in stray lumps--picture galleries and churches and a holiday on the Continent. And all the rest of their time is just-wrongness." Dickie wondered how much of her existence with Lucas Oliver had been "just-wrongness"--or indeed "all-wrongness." But he never disturbed her surface of creamy serenity by referring to the husband who had been murdered by "some person or persons unknown." He and Ruth were the most harmonious of comrades, but never, so far, confidential. Perhaps Dickie overdid tact and non-intrusiveness; or perhaps Ruth, in her very passion of gratitude to him, was yet checked for ever from passionate expression by the memory that her innermost love and her innermost hate, wrung into words, had once, and not so long ago, been read aloud and commented upon in public court and in half the homes of England. One evening, sitting together in front of the fire, they drifted into talk of their separate childhoods. "There was a garden in mine," said Ruth. "And in mine--a Casino garden!" His eyes twinkled. "Palm trees like giant pineapples, and flower beds in a pattern, and a fountain--" "Oh, you poor little Continental kiddie!" He shrugged his shoulders. "The ways of the Lord are thoughtful and orderly. Why should He have wasted a heavenly wilderness of gnarled old apple-trees on a small boy who hated climbing?" "You can't have hated climbing--if you hang that on your wall." She nodded towards the quayside picture. "Surely you must have played 'pirates and South Seas' with your brothers." "I had none. A sister, that's all--who carried a sunshade." "I had no sisters; but there was a girl next door--and her brother." "I note in jealous anguish of spirit," remarked Dickie. "that you do not simply say 'a girl and boy next door.'" Ruth's mischievous laugh affirmed his accusation. "The wall was not very high--I kicked a foothold into it half-way up, and Tommy gave me a pull from the top." "Tommy was ungallant enough to leave the wall to you?" "There were cherries in his garden--sweet black cherries. And only crab-apples in ours."