But--but this woman. They've made a ghastly mistake--they've let her go free--and I can't tell anyone ... nobody knows, except me and Ruth---- Ah, yes--a quivering sigh of relief here--Ruth knows, too--Ruth, my wife--ruth means pity.... There is no Ruth ... there never was ... quite alone except for a strange, strange woman--the kind that gets shut away and kept by herself.... * * * * * To this bondage had Dickie's nerves delivered him. The custom of punctilious courtesy, so deeply ingrained as to mean in his case the impossibility of wounding another, decreed that some pretence must be kept up before Ruth. But with one shock she divined the next morning the significant change in him, and bowed her head to it. What could she do? She loved him, but she had overrated the capacity of his spirit. There had never been any courage, only kindness and sweetness and chivalry--all no good to him, now that courage was wanted. She had made a mistake in telling him the truth. Suffering--she thought she had suffered fiercely with Lucas, she thought she had suffered while she was being ignominiously tried for her life--but what were either of these phases compared with the helpless bitterness of seeing Dickie, whom she loved, afraid of her? Even her periodic fits of wild arrogant passion, which usually, when they surged past restraint, wrecked and altered whatever situation was hemming her in, and left gaps for a passage through to something else--even these had now to be curbed. Useful in hate, they were impotent in love. So Ruth recognised in her new humility. But when one day, seized by panic at having spoken irritably to her, Dickie hastily tried to propitiate her, to ingratiate himself so that she might spare him, might let him live a little longer, then Ruth felt she must cry aloud under the strain of this subtle torture. Why, he was her lover, her man, her child.... In thought, her arm shaped itself into a crook for his head to lie there; her fingers smoothed out the drawn perplexity of his brows; her kisses were cool as snow on his hot, twitching little mouth; her voice, hushed to a lullaby croon, promised him that nobody should hurt him, nobody, while she was there to heal and protect-- "Sleep, baby, sleep, The hills are white with sheep----"