Heckett, Gurth, Ruth—the new life and the old, both were bound up with this pretty blue-eyed girl of eleven, who had come to gentle Ruth Adrian to save Edward Marston from peril, and who was to find her future home beneath Edward Marston’s roof.
The arrangements for the wedding progressed rapidly, the new house was taken and furnished, and gradually the day approached when Ruth’s old home would be broken up and a new life would commence for them all.
Marston was happy when he was with Ruth, but at home by himself he had occasional fits of despondency. The gold robbery kept cropping up in various shapes and forms. Now and again there was a paragraph in the papers stating that the detectives were on the track, and that the deed was ascribed to a gang of accomplished swindlers who had long defied detection.
Marston never read these rumours without experiencing a feeling of terror which it took him some time to banish. It was not for his own fate he trembled—it was the idea of Ruth finding herself mated to a felon.
He banished the thought with a supreme effort. He flung the vision of the future from him with an oath.
‘I will be happy!’ he cried. ‘I can’t think what’s come to me. I never knew what fear was till now.’
Ruth wished to be married quietly, and Marston was quite agreeable. They had no friends they wished to invite. Gertie was to be the only bridesmaid. Marston was asked whom he should have for best man. That puzzled him. He hadn’t a friend in the world he would care to stand by his side when he took sweet Ruth Adrian to be his partner in the journey that lay before him.
No link should be there to connect the old life with the new.
He said he would think about it, and he did. After much cogitation he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t have one at all.
The idea worried him. He knew then that all his life long he had never made a friend whom he dare introduce into the little family circle from which he was taking the chief ornament.