“Ruth!”

“My lord.”  She was beside his couch in a moment.

“I have something to say to you; something I have wanted to say for days.  But I wanted also to think it all out. . . .  I have not yet asked you to forgive me—­”

“Dear, you were forgiven long ago.”

“—­But I have asked Heaven to forgive me.”

Ruth gave a little start and stared at him doubtfully.

“Yes,” he went on, “as I lay pinned—­those hours through, waiting for death—­something opened to me; a new life, I hope.”

“And by a blessing I do not understand—­by a blessing of blessings—­ you were given back to it, Oliver.”

“Back to it?” he repeated.  “You do not understand me.  The blessing was God’s special grace; the new life I speak of was a life acknowledging that grace.”

There was silence for many seconds; for a minute almost, Ruth’s hands had locked themselves together, and she pulled at the intertwisted fingers.

“I beg your pardon,” she said at length.  “You are right—­I do not understand.”  Her voice had lost its ring; the sound of it was leaden, spiritless.  But he failed to note this, being preoccupied with his own thoughts.  Nor did he observe her face.

“I would not speak of this before,” he went on, still with his eyes turned to the window, “because I wanted to think it all out.  But it is true, Ruth; I am a changed man.”

“I hope not.”

Again he did not hear, or he failed to heed.  “Not,” he pursued, “that any amount of thinking could alter the truth.  The mercy of God has been revealed to me.  When a man has been through such horrors—­ lying there, with that infernal woman held to me—­”

“Ah!” she interposed with a catch of the breath.  “Do not curse her.  She was dead, poor thing!”

“I tell you that I cursed her as I cursed myself. . . .  Yes, we both deserved to die.  She died with her teeth in my flesh—­the flesh whose desire was all we ever had in common.”

“Yes . . .  I knew.”

“Have you the coat I wore?”

“It is folded away.  Some boxes of clothes were saved from the house, and I laid it away in one of them.”

“Her teeth must have torn it?”

“Yes.”  Ruth would have moved away in sheer heart-sickness.  Why would he persist in talking thus?

“I shall always keep that coat.  If ever I am tempted to forget the mercy of God, the rent in that coat shall remind me.”

She wanted to cry aloud, “Oh, cease, cease!” This new pietism of his revolted her almost to physical sickness.  She recognised in it the selfishness she had too fatally learned to detect in all pietism.  “At least he had owed enough to his poor little fellow-sinner to spare a thought of pity!” . . .  But a miserable restraint held her tongue as he went on—­

“Yes, Ruth.  God showed Himself to me in that hour; showed me, too, all the evil of my past life.  I had no hope to live; but I vowed to Him then, if I lived, to live as one reformed.”