“No, and you need have none.  I am often very disagreeable,” said Diana candidly, “but my worst enemy won’t charge me with disparaging good looks in other women.”

“May I use your words,” said Ruth, with a shy smile, “and say that you have no need?”

“Rubbish!  And don’t talk like that to me, sitting here and staring you in the face, or I may change my mind again and hate you!  I never said I didn’t envy. . . .  But there, the fault was mine for speaking of ‘good looks’ when I should have said, ‘Oh, you wonder!’” broke off Diana.  “May I ask it—­one question?”

“Twenty, if you will.”

“It is a brutal one; horrible; worse even than mamma’s.”

“As I remember,” said Ruth gravely, “Lady Caroline asked none.  It was I who did the questioning, and—­and I am afraid that led to the trouble.”

Diana laughed, and after a moment the two were laughing together.

“But what is your question?”

“No, I cannot ask it now.”  Diana shook her head, and was grave again.

“Please!”

“Well, then, tell me—­” She drew back, slightly tilting her chin and narrowing her eyes, as one who contemplates a beautiful statue or other work of art.  “Is it true they whipped that, naked, through the streets?”

Ruth bent her head.

“It is true.”

“I wonder it did not kill you,” Diana murmured.

“I am strong; strong and very healthy. . . .  It broke something inside; I hardly know what.  But there’s a story—­I read it the other day—­about a man who wandered in a dark wood, and came to a place where he looked into hell.  Just one glimpse.  He fainted, and when he awoke it was daylight, with the birds singing all around him.  But he was changed more than the place, for he listened and understood all the woodland talk—­what the birds were saying, and the small creeping things.  And when he went back among men he answered at random, and yet in a way that astonished them; for he saw and heard what their hearts were saying, at the back of their talk. . . .  Of course,” smiled Ruth, “I am not nearly so wonderful as that.  But something has happened to me—­”

Diana nodded slowly. “—­Something that, at any rate, makes you terribly disconcerting.  But what about Oliver?  They tell me that he browbeat the magistrates and insisted on sitting beside you.”

Ruth’s eyes confirmed it.  They were moist, yet proud.  They shone.

“I had always,” mused Diana, “looked on my cousin as a carefully selfish person, even in the matter of that Dance woman.  You must have turned his head completely.”

“It was not that.”

Diana stared, the low tone was so earnest, vehement even.  “Well, at all events I know him well enough to assure you he will never give you up.”

“Ah!” Ruth drew a long sigh over the joy in her heart, and, a second later, hated herself for it.