o that it nearly threw her. Ruth, slightly ahead, reined in at
once; so, too, did the groom in the rear, and so violently in his sudden
fear of highwaymen that he brought his horse on to its hind legs and had
it prancing and rearing madly about the road, so that he was hard put to
it to keep his seat.

Ruth looked round as Mr. Wilding's voice greeted her.

"Mistress Wilding," he called to her. "A moment, if I may detain you."

"You have eluded them!" she cried, entirely off her guard in her
surprise at seeing him, and there echoed through her words a note of
genuine gladness that almost disconcerted her husband for a moment. The
next instant a crimson flush overspread her pale face, and her eyes were
veiled from him, vexation in her heart at having betrayed the lively
satisfaction it afforded her to see him safe when she feared him
captured already or at least upon the point of capture.

She had admired him almost unconsciously for his daring at the town hall
that day, when his strong calm had stood out in such sharp contrast to
the fluster and excitement of the men about him; of them all, indeed, it
had seemed to her in those stressful moments that he was the only man,
and she was--although she did not realize it--in danger of being proud
of him. Then again the thing he had done. He had come deliberately to
thrust his head into the lion's maw that he might save her brother. It
was possible that he had done it in answer to the entreaties which she
had earlier feared she had poured into deaf ears; or it was possible
that he had done it spurred by his sense of right and justice, which
would not permit him to allow another to suffer in his stead--however
much that other might be caught in the very toils that he had prepared
for Mr. Wilding himself. Her admiration, then, was swelled by gratitude,
and it was a compound of these that had urged her to hinder the
tything-men from winning past her until he and Trenchard should have got
well away.

Afterwards, when with Diana and her groom--on a horse which Sir Edward
Phelips insisted upon lending them--she rode homeward from Taunton,
there was Diana to keep alive the spark of kindness that glowed at last
for Wilding in Ruth's breast. Miss Horton extolled his bravery, his
chivalry, his nobility, and ended by expressing her envy of Ruth that
she should have won such a man amongst men for her husband, and wondered
what it might be that kept Ruth from claiming him for her own as