"That's it, is it?" she said wearily. "I thart it'd come to that some day."
Just then little Alice danced in from the street, delicate, pale sprite, with anemone-like health and beauty.
"Daddy-paddy!" she said, smiling up at him, as she twined her fingers into his.
He bent and kissed her with unusual tenderness.
"Pray for our little Sue, Lal," he muttered.
The child looked up at him with fearless eyes of forget-me-not blue.
"I be," she said.
He gave her a hand, and they went out together into Motcombe Garden: for they were the best of friends.
Ruth was left. In her heart she had always known that this would come: he would turn on her some day. And she did not blame him: she was too magnanimous. Men were like that, men were. They couldn't help theirsalves. Any one of them but Ernie would have thrown her past up at her long before. She was more grateful for his past forbearance than resentful at his present vindictiveness. Now that the blow, so long hovering above her in the dimness of sab-consciousness, had fallen she felt the pain of it, dulled indeed by the fact that she was already suffering profoundly on Susie's account. But the impact braced her; and it was better so. There was no life without suffering and struggle. If you faced that fact with your eyes open, never luxuriating in the selfishness of make-believe, compelling your teeth to meet on the granite realities of life, then there would be no dreadful shock as you fell out of your warm bed and rosy dreams into an icy pool.
Ruth went back to her hum-drum toil. She had been dreaming. Now she must awake. It was Ernie who had roused her from that dangerous lethargy with a brutal slash across the face; and she was not ungrateful to him.