Her eyes travelled down her young figure, shapely yet.
"All right, my darling," she cooed. "You shan't suffer—not if it were ever so."
Her face was to the future. At whatever cost, she would be true to the trust imposed on her unsought.
Indeed, so sane was she and strong, that but for the old couple in the little yellow-washed cottage in the valley of the Ruther, who had taught Bible-class there for thirty years, she believed her fear would have been blotted out by the hope her baby, pushing through the crust of her terror like a crocus through the chill wintry earth into February sunshine, brought her.
For she recognized with a sob of bitterness that these brooding months, when her child, thrusting with tiny hands and inarticulate cries, was opening for her the Door of Escape into the Open Country that lies for each one of us outside the Prison that is Self, would have been the most beautiful in her life, if Humanity had blessed her for the sufferings she was enduring on its behalf, if Society had supported and pitied her when she had fallen into the trap that it had laid.
As things were, she was an outlaw, who would be stoned alike by men and women when it was discovered that an innocent indiscretion, prompted by a noble natural impulse, had flung her into the miry pit.
She turned and looked across the flats at her back to the great camp of men, crouching for their prey.
The Downs behind seemed to circle it as with a wall of dulled steel, making escape impossible; while over in the West was a murky glow as of damped-down furnaces, waiting to open their doors and pour down molten gloom on the City of the Plain.
Ruth rose up swiftly and returned to the Hotel.
Better even its unsympathetic walls than the naked desolation of the waste.