It was right, then, that Ronald Mervyn should suffer, but it was not right that he should be hung. If he could clear himself without her being obliged to denounce George Forester, let him do so; but if not, if he were found guilty, then she had no other course open to her. She must come forward and produce the knife and describe how she had found it, and confess why she had so long concealed it. All this would be very terrible. She pictured to herself the amazement of the court, the disapproval with which her conduct would be received, the way in which she would be blamed by all who knew her, the need there would be for going away from home afterwards and living somewhere where no one would know her story; but not for this did she ever waver in her determination. Ronald Mervyn must be saved from hanging, for she would be as bad as a murderess if she kept silent and suffered him to be executed for a crime she knew that he had not committed. Still she would not do it until the last thing; not till everything else failed would she denounce George Forester as a murderer. She loved him no longer; she knew that had he not been interrupted he would perhaps have killed her. It was partly the thought of their boy-and-girl life, and of the hours they had spent together by the side of the Dare, that softened her heart; this and the thought of the misery of the kind old man, his father. "I don't understand Ruth," the doctor said one day to Mrs. Powlett. "She ought to get better faster than she does. Of course she has had a terrible shock, and I quite understand its affecting her as it did, just as she was recovering from her former illness; but she does not mend as she ought to do. She has lost strength instead of gaining it during the past week. She is flushed and feverish, and has a hunted look about her eyes. If I had known nothing of the circumstances of the case I should have said that she has something on her mind." "There is nothing she can have on her mind," Hesba Powlett replied. "You know we had trouble with her about that good-for-nothing George Forester?" The doctor nodded. It was pretty well known throughout the village how matters stood. "She gave him up weeks and weeks ago, just at the time he went away, when he was wanted for the share he had in that poaching business up in the Carne Woods. She told her father that she saw we had been right, and would have nothing more to say to him. That was a week or more before she had that fall on the hill, and I have never heard her mention his name since. I feel sure that she is not fretting about him. Ruth has always been a sensible girl, and once she has made up her mind she wasn't likely to turn back again."