e had, and she had not. Her own promised splendours, the command of
wealth and of a great household--this aspect of the future was blank to
her as yet. But another presented itself and frightened her: it engaged
her conscience in doubts even when she shook it free of fears.
The Family--that mysterious shadow of which Lady Caroline no doubt
showed as the ugliest projection! Ruth was conscientious. She divined
that behind Lady Caroline's aggressiveness the shadow held something
truly sacred and worth guarding; something impalpable and yet immensely
solid; something not to be defied or laughed away because inexplicable,
but venerable precisely because it could not be explained; something not
fashioned hastily upon reason, but built by slow accretion, with the
years for its builders--mortared by sentiments, memories, traditions,
decencies, trivialities good and bad, even (may be) by the blood of
foolish quarrels--but founded and welded more firmly, massed more
formidably, than any structure of mere reason; and withal a temple
wherein she, however chastely, might never serve without profaning it.

I do most eagerly desire you, at this point in her story, to be just to
Ruth Josselin. I wish you to remember what she had suffered, in the
streets, at the hands of self-righteous folk; to understand that it had
killed all religion in her, with all belief in its rites, but not the
essential goodness of her soul.

She at any rate, and according to the light given her, was incurably
just. Weighing on the one hand her love and Oliver Vyell's, on the
other the half-guessed injury their marriage might do to him and to
others of his race; weighing them not hastily but through long hours of
thought: carrying her doubts off to the hills and there considering them
in solitude, under the open sky; casting out from the problem all of
self save only her exceeding love; this strange girl--made strange by
man's cruelty--decided to give herself in due time, but to exact no
marriage.

Why should she? The blessing of a clergyman meant nothing to her, as
she was sure it meant nothing to her lover. Why should she tie him a
day beyond the endurance of his love? Beyond the death of the thing
itself what sanctity could live in its husk? And, moreover, in any
event was she not his slave?

So she reasoned: and let the reader call her reasoning by any name he
will. By some standards it was wicked; by others wrong. It forgot one
of the stron