"Why, Frank," she said, with scarcely enough breath to speak the words, "if you do not believe me it will kill me!"
Just then some one came to the door and beckoned to him, and he went out. Ruth turned, with a breaking heart, to go up stairs. The youthful jeweller was talking to Mrs. Tascher in the hall. "Yes," he was saying, "I saw it all. She was standing leaning over the well, and was just turning to step back when she gave a sort of lurch as if she had got dizzy, and Miss Stanley reached out her hand and caught her by the shoulder. But she had got the start of her, and over she went in a twinkling. The whole thing was done in an instant."
"Oh, Mr. Omes, I wish you would explain all that to Doctor Ebling," said Ruth, coming up.
"Oh, he knows all about it: he saw it the same as I did," said the young man.
A suspicion crossed Ruth's mind that the doctor knew, but she could not believe him so base.
Miss Custer was doomed to have a serious time of it, after all. The great excitement brought on fever again, and for some days her recovery was thought doubtful. Everybody in the house did all that was in her or his power to do, and the doctor was more devoted than ever. It became a fixed idea that he would marry Miss Custer as soon as she was able to sit up. He and Ruth scarcely spoke to each other.
One day Mrs. Tascher told Ruth she must go away.
"Yes, I know," answered Ruth: "I am going."
She packed her trunk again—this time taking all her things—and went back to her aunt's. In less than a week Mrs. Tascher had a letter from her stating that she had started, under the escort of a friend of her guardian's, for Beirut.
It was so great a shock to Mrs. Tascher that she scarcely left her room for ten days after it, and indeed did not wholly recover until another letter came, dated from far-off Syria, with a curious commingling of the strange and the familiar in the well-known handwriting and the foreign post-mark, assuring her that her young friend was safely sheltered under the protection of her guardian and his estimable wife. Ruth dwelt entirely upon her new experience, and never mentioned the old. She had not so much to say about her journey, though it was interesting and delightful, as about her arrival and the meeting with her dear friends, whose loved faces were so sweetly familiar in that strange, strange land that she fell upon their necks and wept. She drew vivid pictures of the magnificent scenery that lay around her in her new home—the gardens, the orange-groves, the figs and olives, the terraced slope of Mount Lebanon, the glorious Mediterranean.