"No, I cannot ask it now." Diana shook her head, and was grave again.
"Please!"
"Well, then, tell me—" She drew back, slightly tilting her chin and narrowing her eyes, as one who contemplates a beautiful statue or other work of art. "Is it true they whipped that, naked, through the streets?"
Ruth bent her head.
"It is true."
"I wonder it did not kill you," Diana murmured.
"I am strong; strong and very healthy. . . . It broke something inside; I hardly know what. But there's a story—I read it the other day—about a man who wandered in a dark wood, and came to a place where he looked into hell. Just one glimpse. He fainted, and when he awoke it was daylight, with the birds singing all around him. But he was changed more than the place, for he listened and understood all the woodland talk—what the birds were saying, and the small creeping things. And when he went back among men he answered at random, and yet in a way that astonished them; for he saw and heard what their hearts were saying, at the back of their talk. . . . Of course," smiled Ruth, "I am not nearly so wonderful as that. But something has happened to me—"
Diana nodded slowly. "—Something that, at any rate, makes you terribly disconcerting. But what about Oliver? They tell me that he browbeat the magistrates and insisted on sitting beside you."
Ruth's eyes confirmed it. They were moist, yet proud. They shone.
"I had always," mused Diana, "looked on my cousin as a carefully selfish person, even in the matter of that Dance woman. You must have turned his head completely."