“What is't you mean?” she asked. “Speak, Sir Rowland, speak plainly, that I may give you a plain answer.”
It was a challenge in which another man had seen how hopeless was his case, and, accepting defeat, had made as orderly a retreat as still was possible. But Sir Rowland, stricken in his vanity, went headlong on to utter rout.
“Since you ask me in such terms I will be plain, indeed,” he answered her. “I mean...” He almost quailed before the look that met him from her intrepid eyes. “Do you not see my meaning, Ruth?”
“That which I see,” said she, “I do not believe, and as I would not wrong you by any foolish imaginings, I would have you plain with me.”
Yet the egregious fool went on. “And why should you not believe your senses?” he asked her, between anger and entreaty. “Is it wonderful that I should love you? Is it...?”
“Stop!” She drew back a pace from him. There was a moment's silence, during which it seemed she gathered her forces to destroy him, and, in the spirit, he bowed his head before the coming storm. Then, with a sudden relaxing of the stiffness her lissom figure had assumed, “I think you had better leave me, Sir Rowland,” she advised him. She half turned and moved a step away; he followed with lowering glance, his upper lip lifting and laying bare his powerful teeth. In a stride he was beside her.
“Do you hate me, Ruth?” he asked her hoarsely.
“Why should I hate you?” she counter-questioned, sadly. “I do not even dislike you,” she continued in a more friendly tone, adding, as if by way of explaining this phenomenon, “You are my brother's friend. But I am disappointed in you, Sir Rowland. You had, I know, no intention of offering me disrespect; and yet it is what you have done.”
“As how?” he asked.
“Knowing me another's wife...”