"I don't ardly like to see you there, Ruth," said Ernie gently. "I don't really."
She lifted her face to him in the darkness.
"Where?"
"The Third Floor."
Ruth turned her face to him. Her wall was down. She was talking intimately almost as a woman to a woman she trusts.
"I don't hardly myself," she said in the musing voice of the disturbed. "The gentlemen are that funny. Seem scarcely respectable, some of em. And the couples too. Might not be married the way they go on. London, I suppose."
He glanced at her covertly.
She met his eyes—so frank, so fearless.
What a man of the world Ernie felt beside this white ewe-lamb straying far from the fold in the hollow of its native coombe!
They were skirting now the fosse of the Redoubt.