“Now close your eyes,” he insisted, when they were together in the cab.

Ruth did as she was told.

“I feel that it is all wrong,” she murmured, leaning back, “but it is like little bits out of a fairy book, and to-night I feel so weak and you are so strong.  It isn’t any use my saying anything, Arnold, is it?”

“Not a bit,” he answered.  “All that you have to do is to hold my hand and wait.”

In less than ten minutes the cab stopped.  He hurried her into the entrance hall of a tall, somewhat somber building.  A man in uniform rang a bell and the lift came down.  They went up, it seemed to her, seven or eight flights.  When they stepped out, her knees were trembling.  He caught her up and carried her down a corridor.  Then he fitted a Yale key from his pocket into a lock and threw open the door.  There was a little hall inside, with three doors.  He pushed open the first; it was a small bedroom, plainly but not unattractively furnished.  He carried her a little way further down the corridor and threw open another door—­a tiny sitting-room with a fire burning.

“Our new quarters!” he exclaimed cheerfully.  “The room at the other end of the passage is mine.  A pound a week and a woman to come in and light the fires!  Mr. Jarvis let me have some money and I paid three months’ rent in advance.  What do you think of them?”

“I can’t think,” she whispered.  “I can’t!”

He carried her to the window.

“This is my real surprise, dear,” he announced, in a tone of triumph.  “Look!”

The blind flew up at his touch.  On the other side of the street was a row of houses over which they looked.  Beyond, the river, whose dark waters were gleaming in the moonlight.  On their left were the Houses of Parliament, all illuminated.  On their right, the long, double line of lights shining upon the water at which they had gazed so often.

“The lighted way, dear,” he murmured, holding her a little more closely to him.  “While I am down in the city you can sit here and watch, and you can see the ships a long way further off than you could ever see them from Adam Street.  You can see the bend, too.  It’s always easier, isn’t it, to fancy that something is coming into sight around the corner?”

She was not looking.  Her head was buried upon his shoulder.  Arnold was puzzled.

“Look up, Ruth dear,” he begged.  “I want you to look now—­look along the lighted way and hold my hand very tightly.  Don’t you think that, after all, one of your ships has come home?”

She lifted her face, wet with tears, and looked in the direction where he pointed.  Arnold, who felt nothing himself but a thrill of pleasure at his new quarters, was puzzled at a certain trouble which he seemed to see in her features, a faint hopelessness of expression.  She looked where he pointed but there was none of the eager expectancy of a few weeks ago.

“It is beautiful, Arnold,” she murmured, “but I can’t talk just now.”