A chance phrase of Mrs. Trupp's now recurred to her.
"There's so much in Ernie—if you can only get it out."
The man opposite rose slowly, came slowly to her, bent slowly and kissed her.
"I ask your pardon if I was rough with you this evening, Ruth," he said. "But Alf!—he fairly maddens me. I feel to him as you shouldn't feel to any human being, let alone your own brother. You know what he's after?" he continued.
She stirred and coloured, as she lifted her eyes to his, dark with an unusual tenderness.
"Reckon so, Ern," she said.
He stood before the fire, for once almost handsome in his vehemence.
"Layin his smutty hands on you!" he said.
That little scene, with its suggestion of passion suppressed, steadied Ruth.... And it was time. That Other was always drawing nearer. And as she felt his approach, the savage power of him, his fierce virility, and was conscious of the reality of the danger, she resolved to meet it and fend it off. He should save Ernie instead of destroying her. And the way was clear. If this new intellectual life, the seeds of which the engineer had been sowing so patiently for so long in the unkempt garden of Ernie's spirit became a reality for him, a part of himself, growing in such strength as to strangle the weeds of carelessness, he was saved—so much Ruth saw.
"Once he was set alight to, all his rubbish'd go up in a flare, and he'd burn bright as aflame," she told the engineer once seizing her chance; and ended on the soft note of the turtle-dove—"There's just one could set him ablaze—and only one. And that's you, Joe."