"I like you the better for it."
"I did not believe—"
"Yet you might have believed. . . . And suppose that it were true, sir?"
He shook visibly. "I pray God to protect you," he managed to stammer.
Her face was white, but she answered him steadily. "I believe you to be a good man. . . . I will go to them. Where is Dicky?" She glanced back along the alley.
"Dicky will stand where I have told him to stand: for hours unless I release him."
"Is that your naval code? And can a mere child stand by it so proudly? Oh," cried she, fixing on him a look he remembered all his days, "would to God I had been born a man!"
Yet fearlessly as any man she entered the great drawing-room. Miss Quiney still lay collapsed on her sofa. Mrs. Harry bent over her, but faced about.
"Mr. Hanmer managed, then, to discover you? Two women have called. . . . I thought it better, their errand being what it was, to show them out."
"I can guess it, perhaps," Ruth caught her up with a wan smile.
"They managed to talk with him before he gave them their dismissal."