ose and strong one that it
certainly could not be broken or even strained by a few hasty,
passionate words, repented at once. Her lovely eyes were already seeking
his face and silently appealing to this old and faithful affection.

But William's gaze did not meet hers. He was looking into the fire and
seeing what had occurred with wholly different eyes. To him everything
was altered, and nothing could ever make the relation between them what
it had been. No tenderness of affection, no length of association, no
faithfulness of service, could stand for an instant against a single one
of the many blows that his morbid self-love had received. For self-love
like his is an incurable disease of sensibility, a spreading canker
which poisons the whole character, as an unsound spot in the flesh
poisons the whole body. To those who have not come in close contact with
this form of morbidity, it may seem impossible that William Pressley's
love for Ruth, which had been real so far as it went, should have
hardened into dislike almost as soon as the words that wounded it had
left her lips. Yet that was precisely what had taken place, quite
naturally and even inevitably. He had loved her as much as he was
capable of loving, mainly because of the deep gratification which he
found in her great esteem for himself. No one else had ever come so near
granting his self-love all that it demanded. Her sweet presence, always
looking up to him, had been like the perpetual swinging of a censer
perpetually giving the fragrant incense that his vanity craved. And now
all this was changed. The gentle acolyte was gone, the censer no longer
swung, and instead there was a keen critic armed with words as hard as
stones. No, there was nothing strange in the fact that, when William
Pressley finally turned his gaze on Ruth, he looked at her as if she had
been a stranger whom he had never seen before; an utter stranger, and
one moreover whose presence was so utterly antagonistic to him that
there was not the remotest possibility of any liking between them. But
he said nothing, and gave no indication of what he felt. No feeling was
ever strong enough to cause him to say or do an unconsidered thing. In
this, as in all things, he waited to be sure that he was doing what
would place himself in the best possible light. While he had never a
moment's doubt of being wholly in the right, he thought it best to wait
and consider his own appearance in the matter. And then,