The cowman, who was helping the gardener clear away the remains of the storm, came up from the fallen tree and spoke to him. He was sorry to hear there was illness at the house. North thanked him mechanically and escaped into the flower garden. The few remaining flowers were beaten to the ground, their heads draggled in the wet earth. He got out his knife and began to cut them off and tidy up the border. He could watch the house at the same time. The minutes dragged like hours, and then, at last, the door on to the terrace opened, and Ruth came out. She looked round and, catching sight of him, hurried by the shortest way, across the wet grass, to meet him. His pain-ravaged face smote her with a great pity. She held out both her hands to meet his. “I could not come before,” she said. “She is quieter now. Oh, do not feel like that! She will get well. I know she will get well.” “Where can we go to be alone?” he asked. “I must hear what happened. It is that which has been driving me mad.” “Let us go and walk along the path under the ‘house on the wall,’” she said. “No one will come there and it is sheltered and warm in the sun.” And there, pacing up and down, she told him, as well as she could, the happenings of the night before. North ground his teeth. “She would be better dead,” he said. “And yet——” He looked at her, a new horror growing in his haggard eyes, a question——? “She will not die,” said Ruth. “But don’t you understand, don’t you believe, whether she lives or dies the evil is conquered, is transmuted, is taken in to the Eternal Good?” “No, I cannot believe,” said North harshly. “I think you are playing with words. It seems to me that only Evil is powerful. If anything survives, it is that.” Ruth looked at him with very gentle eyes. “Wait,” she said. “Have just a little patience. She will get well, and then you will believe.” “I cannot believe,” said Roger North. The words fell heavily, like stones. He paced restlessly backwards and forwards, crunching the wet gravel viciously under his feet. “The house might have been burnt down. You—I suppose you think that was the object?” “Yes, I think it must have been so. At any rate one of them.” “That is the loathsome horror of it all!” North burst forth savagely. “I believe just enough, because in no other way can I account for what has happened, to make me dread death for her in a way I should never have dreaded it otherwise. I have always looked on our personal grief as fundamentally selfish.” Ruth was silent. He seemed beyond the reach of help, and she would have given so much to help him. That he, at any rate for the moment, gave no thought to what she had been through disturbed her not at all.