"My child, we have every reason to believe so."
"Then what do you make of this?" The girl took up a small volume that lay on the top of the harpsichord, and thrust it into her mother's hands.
"Eh? What?" Lady Caroline turned the book back uppermost and spelled out the title through her eyeglass. "'Ovid'—he's Latin, is he not? Dear, I had no notion that you kept up your studies in that—er— tongue."
"I do not. I have forgot what little I learned of it, and that was next to nothing. But open the book, please, at the title-page."
"I see nothing. It has neither book-plate nor owner's signature." (Indeed Ruth never wrote her name in her books. She looked upon them as her lord's, and hers only in trust.)
"The title-page, I said. You are staring at the flyleaf."
"Ah, to be sure—" Lady Caroline turned a leaf. "Is this what you mean?" She held up a loose sheet of paper covered with writing.
"Read it."
The elder lady found the range of her eyeglass and conned—in silence and without well grasping its purport—the following effusion:—
Other maids make Love a foeman,
Lie in ambush to defeat him;
I alone will step to meet him
Valiant, his accepted woman.
Equal, consort in his car,
Ride I to his royal war.