"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said so gently that he loved her all the more. "Why not then?" "I'm afraid." "What of?" "Afraid you might ask me more'n what I can give." "I'll run the risk!" cried Ernie. "I'm ready!" She shook her head. He took her hand. "I'm a good man, Ruth," he said with the almost divine simplicity of the class to which he now belonged. She overwhelmed him with tenderness. "O, I know you are, Ernie!" she said in her purring voice of a wood-pigeon at evening. "But I'm not thinking of settling--not yet." The love-passage relieved Ernie immensely. He would face defeat, face Captain Royal, face the future with confidence now. Thereafter for some time he went about his work whistling, so that Don John, the Austrian, winked at his mates behind his back, and said, "He thinks she's for him! No fool like an English fool!" When he came back from his week-end away, Captain Royal went straight to Madame's private sitting-room, which was at the end of the Third Floor. As he came out and passed along the corridor he saw Ruth sitting on the window-sill in the passage, where Ernie had suddenly known himself in love with her. He stopped. There was a bundle of mending beside her, and among it he recognized his own pyjamas. Royal knew there was a sitting-room for the maids, called by the habitués of the Third Floor, "the Nunnery," and wondered. That evening, when she came to put out his evening clothes, he said to her, "You don't care about using the maids' sitting-room, Ruth?" She did not answer. "The other girls aren't your sort? too rowdy--what?" Again she fell back on characteristic silence. Each of the bed-rooms on the Third Floor had a dressing-room attached. "Well, you know my hours," he continued. "You use my dressing-room to work in whenever you like. I never use it myself; and I know you've a lot to do for me." Ruth thanked him; and after that in the afternoons, when he was out, and in the evenings, when he was at dinner, she would sit in his dressing-room and work. One evening, as she sat beside the window, her dark head bent over her work, she was aware that he was standing over her. He had come in on her very quietly from behind, not through his bed-room but through the door of the dressing-room that opened into the corridor. She rose to go, gathering her work. He put his hand upon her shoulder, and pressed her gently back into the chair. She trembled beneath his touch. "No," he said. "Don't go. I like to have you there." She glanced swiftly at the door behind her. "That's all right," he laughed. "It's shut." Then he moved into the bed-room. "I'm not going to close the door," he said, "because I like to see you there when I look up from my work." She lifted her eyes to his, full of confidence and affection. He was not a man; he was a God--and to be treated as such: he could do no wrong. He smiled at her friendly from his chair.