At first he was too bewildered to find words. Then: "You care for some one else?" he groped unbelievingly.
She looked away, but nodded; her tears were falling.
He moved a little away and then sat there quite still. A breeze had come up and the vines beat against the porch, making a sound that like the flaming look of a moment ago he never forgot.
She knew that he must be wondering; he knew her life there, or what seemed her life. He must be wondering who it was she cared for like that.
She laid her hand upon his arm; and when he turned to her she did not say anything at all, but the appeal that looked through pain perhaps went where words could not have gone.
"But you're not happy!" he exclaimed, in a sort of harsh exulting in that.
She shook her head; her eyes were brimming over.
He looked away from her, his own hurt and surprise rousing a savage thing in him that did not want to do what the pleading pain of her eyes so eloquently asked of him. He had always thought that he was to have Ruth. Well, he was not to have her—there were ugly things which, in that first moment, surged into his disappointment. Some one else was to have her. But she was not happy! Defeated feeling wrenched its own sorry satisfaction from that.
"Why aren't you happy?" he asked of her abruptly, roughly.
She did not answer, and so he had to look at her. And when he saw Ruth's face his real love for her broke through the ugliness of thwarted passion. "Can't you tell me, Ruth?" he asked gently.