He paused here, as if waiting for her to speak.  She did not speak.  She felt her whole body stiffening; she wanted too to laugh outright, scornfully.  “The evil of his past life?  Am I next to be expelled, as a part of it?  Is it up to this he would lead? . . .  God help me, if there be a God!—­that this should be the man I loved!”

“And another oath I swore,” he went on solemnly:  “to do what compensation I may to any my sinning has injured.  You are the chief of these.”

“I, Oliver?”

“You, who under Heaven were made, and properly, the means of saving my life to repentance.”

Somehow with this new piety he had caught the very phraseology and intonation of its everyday professors, even those very tricks of bad logic at which he had been used to laugh.  Ruth had always supposed, for example, that the presumption of instructing the Deity in appropriate conduct was impossible even to second-rate minds until by imitation slowly acquired as a habit.  It was monstrous to her that he should so suddenly and all unconsciously be guilty of it.  Indeed for the moment these small evidences of the change in him distressed her more than the change itself, which she had yet to realise; just as in company a solecism of speech or manners will make us wince before we have time to trace it to the ill-breeding from which it springs.  His mother, she had heard (he, in fact, had told her), was given to these pious tricks of speech.  Surely his fine brain had suffered some lesion.  He was not himself, and she must wait for his recovery.  But surely, too, he would recover and be himself again.

“Ruth, I have done you great wrong.”

“O cease! cease, Oliver!” Her voice cried it aloud now, as she dropped to her knees and buried her face in the coverlet.  “Do not talk like this—­I had a hundred times rather you neglected me than hear you talk so! You have done me evil? You, my lord, my love?  You, who saved me?  You, in whose eyes I have found grace, and in that my great, great happiness?  You, in whose light my life has moved? . . .  Ah, love, do not break my heart!”

“You misunderstand,” he said quietly.  “Why should what I am saying break your heart?  I am asking you to marry me.”

She rose from her knees very slowly and went to the window.  Standing there, again she battled off the temptation to laugh wildly. . . .  She fought it down after a minute, and turned to encounter his gaze, which had not ceased to rest on her as she stood with her beautiful figure silhouetted against the evening light.

“You really think my marrying you would make a difference?”

“To me it would make all the difference,” he urged, but still very gently, as one who, sure of himself, might reason with a child.  “I doubt if I shall recover, indeed, until this debt is paid.”

“A debt, Oliver?  What kind of debt?”

“Why, of gratitude, to be sure.  Did you not win me back from death?—­to be a new and different man henceforth, please God!”