Therefore the shock of realization that the wages of sin are death--as our fathers used to put it; or that weakness brings its own reward--as we should more prosaically say; because it comes gradually to the human consciousness, is mercifully numbed. It was some time before Ruth faced the fact that she was in the toils, and that there was no escaping. When at length the dreadful dream had become a reality, and she was forced to acknowledge to herself the life she bore within her, it seemed to her for a moment that the worst was passed. On the morrow of the night on which the hidden voice refused longer to be hushed, she went away by herself on to the Crumbles: that bird-haunted waste of stagnant pools and tussocky shingles which stretches along the edge of the Bay to Pevensey. There at least she would be sure of being alone save for a rare creature of the Wilderness, snipe or wild duck, hare or slow-winged heron. Half a mile from the great Hotel, rising sepulchre-wise from the surrounding desolation, her back to the town, and her face to the sea, she sat down on the lonely beach and girdled her knees with her arms. It was a dull November afternoon. The remorseless sea crawled like a serpent out of the gloom, curled an ugly lip at her as it reared to stare, then softly falling to the ground, scudded towards her with a hideous little hiss, to suck her down, the victim of its lust. The dumb sky offered her no help. There was neither song nor sun. And back in the West, amassed under significant gloom, lay the great camp of men, hostile now to her and hers, to which she must yet return. Sitting thus by the scolding sea, her chin on her knees, she looked the situation in the sombre eyes. It was terrible enough. She had to pay the price every mothering woman must pay--disfigurement, pain, dependency, long-drawn physical disease, and, at the end of all, torment and possibly death: and in her case, added to the price Nature asks of those women who obey her laws, there was the penalty Man demands of those who violate his. For her, and such as her, there is in Society, as at present organized, but one sure way of escape: and that way Ruth was too near to Nature, too healthy in mind and body, to contemplate save for a passing moment. Her eyes travelled down her young figure, shapely yet. "All right, my darling," she cooed. "You shan't suffer--not if it were ever so." Her face was to the future. At whatever cost, she would be true to the trust imposed on her unsought. Indeed, so sane was she and strong, that but for the old couple in the little yellow-washed cottage in the valley of the Ruther, who had taught Bible-class there for thirty years, she believed her fear would have been blotted out by the hope her baby, pushing through the crust of her terror like a crocus through the chill wintry earth into February sunshine, brought her.