Once, when Ernie looked in, he saw her kneeling by the window, her back to the door, her arms deep in a half-empty trunk. Mooney winked at him and nodded over his shoulder. Ernie, standing in the door, met him with the face of a hostile stone. "Can I help?" he asked. "No, thank-you," Ruth answered. "We're nearly through." By noon the task was finished, and the baggage downstairs piled at the back-door. Mooney and Don John lunched together in the basement. Ernie, passing, saw them, and heard his own name mentioned. Don John was telling a story. Mooney, following Ernie with his eyes, was unpleasantly amused. Later Ernie helped to put the luggage on a cab. He volunteered for the work and did it gladly. As the cab moved off, his heart seemed to lift and lighten. The burden he had carried for so many months was being borne away on the top of that oppressed and heavy-laden vehicle. Then his eye caught Mooney's. The man, smart almost as his master, was sitting back in the cab, his eyes half shut, and his lips slightly parted. Between them protruded the tip of his tongue. Mooney was mocking him. A few days later Ernie missed Ruth from the Third Floor. He asked Céleste where she had gone. "Gone to the Second Floor," the girl answered. "She's waiting on a missionary. Makes a nice change after the Captain." Ernie was glad, yet sorry. He saw little of the girl thereafter; and she avoided him. But he still possessed the ten-pound note she had cast away on the morning of Captain Royal's departure, and was worried as to what he should do with it. He could not send it to her, for she would know the sender. He could not give it her, for it was the price of--what? And there was no one whom he could consult. His dad in such matters was a child; his mother would be unsympathetic; Mr. Pigott would be too simple to understand. Then one autumn afternoon, as he was walking home across Saffrons Croft through rustling gold-drifts beneath the elms, he met Mrs. Trupp coming down the hill silvery-haired, gracious, and smiling in upon his gloom. "Well, dreamer," she said. "Not hard to know whose son you are!" Ernie looked up, and made one of those lightning resolutions of his. "Beg pardon, 'm," he said. "Could I come and see you this evening?" "You could, Ernie," answered the other. "And about time too!" That evening, when the blinds were drawn, and the lamps lit, Ernie found himself alone with his godmother in the long-windowed drawing-room, telling his story. Mrs. Trupp, whom cruelty, in its manifold forms, could rouse to a white-hot anger that surprised those who did not know her, listened quivering and with downward eyes. "What was the man's name?" she asked at last. "Captain Royal," Ernie answered without hesitation. She nodded.