She overwhelmed him with tenderness.
"O, I know you are, Ernie!" she said in her purring voice of a wood-pigeon at evening. "But I'm not thinking of settling—not yet."
The love-passage relieved Ernie immensely. He would face defeat, face Captain Royal, face the future with confidence now.
Thereafter for some time he went about his work whistling, so that Don John, the Austrian, winked at his mates behind his back, and said,
"He thinks she's for him! No fool like an English fool!"
When he came back from his week-end away, Captain Royal went straight to Madame's private sitting-room, which was at the end of the Third Floor. As he came out and passed along the corridor he saw Ruth sitting on the window-sill in the passage, where Ernie had suddenly known himself in love with her.
He stopped. There was a bundle of mending beside her, and among it he recognized his own pyjamas.
Royal knew there was a sitting-room for the maids, called by the habitués of the Third Floor, "the Nunnery," and wondered.
That evening, when she came to put out his evening clothes, he said to her,
"You don't care about using the maids' sitting-room, Ruth?"