“Is one, then, to be considerate with cowards?”

“Certainly, if you honour cowards with your friendship.”

“Friendship! . . .  The dog likes his platter and I suffer him for his talk.  When his talk trespasses beyond sufferance, I chastise him.  That’s how I look at it.”

“I am sorry, my lord, that Mr. Silk should make the third on your list this morning.”

“Oh, come; you don’t ask me to apologise to Silk!”

“To him rather than to me.”

“But—­oh nonsense!  He was disgusting—­unspeakable, I tell you.  If you suppose I struck him for nothing—­”

“I do not.”

“You cannot think what he said.”

“Something about me, was it not?” Then, as Sir Oliver stood silent, “Something a great many folk—­your guests included—­are quite capable of thinking about me, though they have not Mr. Silk’s gift of language.”

“—­That gift for which (you will go on to remind me) I suffer him.”

“No; that gift which (you said) trespasses beyond sufferance.”  She did not remind him that he, after all, had exposed her and provoked Mr. Silk’s uncleanly words.

Both were beating time now.  He had come, as was meet, to offer an apology, and with no intent beyond.  He found not only that Ruth Josselin was grown a woman surpassing fair, but that her mere presence (it seemed, by no will of hers, but in spite of her will) laid hold of him, commanding him to face a further intent.  It was wonderful, and yet just at this moment it mattered little, that the daylight soberly confirmed what had dazzled his drunkenness over night; that her speech added good sense to beauty. . . .  What mattered at the moment was a sense of urgency, oppressing and oppressed by an equal sense of helplessness.

He had set the forces working and, with that, had chosen to stand aside—­in indolence partly, partly in a careful cultivated indifference, but in part also obeying motives more creditable.  He had stood aside, promising the result, but himself dallying with time.  And lo! of a sudden the result had overtaken him.  Had he created a monster, in place of a beautiful woman, he had not been more at its mercy.

But why this sense of urgency?  And why should he allow it to oppress him?

Here was a creature exquisite, desirable, educated for no purpose but to be his.  Then why not declare himself, leap the last easy fence and in a short while make her his?

To be sure her education—­which, as we have seen, owned one source and spring, the passion to make herself perfect for his sake—­had fashioned a woman very different to the woman of his planning.  She had built not upon his careless defective design but upon her own incessant instinct for the best.  So much his last night’s blunder had taught him.  He had sent for her as for a handmaid; and as a handmaid she had obeyed—­but in spirit as a queen.