e gave fair notice that he had moved in this
matter, himself.

"I didn't know father had received a letter from Godfrey," said Ruth,
shading her face from the lamp, and lifting to Leonard a smile which
implied that it would have been but fair for him to have told her.

"It came the day before Arthur went away," replied Leonard, and Ruth
reluctantly chose a new topic.

They rarely had an evening together thus, and with a soft rain falling
at the open windows they sat and talked on many themes in what was to
them a very talkative way. When something brought up the subject of the
late noted trial, Ruth asked her brother how it had first come to him to
suspect so unsuspected a man.

His reply was tardy. "Partly," he said, and mused while he spoke,
"because I am so unsuspected a man myself."

He looked up with a smile, half play, half pain. "I know what the mind
of an unsuspected man is capable of--under pressure."

The questioner looked on him with fond faith, and then, dropping her
eyes to her needlework, said, "That wasn't all that prompted you, was
it?"

"No," replied the brother, again musing. "I had noticed the singular
value of wanton guesswork."

"I thought so," said the sister. Her needle flagged and stopped, and
each knew the other's mind was on the implacable divinations of one
morbid soul.

Leonard leaned and fingered the needlework,--a worsted slipper, too
small for most men, too large for most women. "Is that for him?"

"Yes," apologized Ruth; "it's the thing every clergyman has to incur.
But I'm only doing it to help Isabel out; she has the other."

The evening went quickly. When Leonard let down the window sashes and
lowered the shades, Ruth, standing by the lamp as if to put out its
light, said, "I'll not go up for a moment or two yet."

She sent him an ardent smile across the room and turned to a desk.

XI

HAS IT COME TO THIS?

Ruth wrote to her lover. Her father's keeping secret his receipt of
Godfrey's letter until he had mailed its answer, could mean only that
the answer was for Godfrey to come home. The General's talk of being
tired by the writing of it was a purely expletive irony, for he had
written with the brevity of an old soldier to a young sailor; but he had
written that trouble was impending, that its source was Arthur, and that
the last hope of removing it lay with him, Godfrey.

A line from Ruth, pursuing after this message, would be one steamer
behind it all the