“You aren’t really feeling like that, Ruth?” he begged.  “Don’t!  My new friends are part of the new life.  You wouldn’t have me cling to the old any longer than I can help?  Why, you and I together have sat here hour after hour and prayed for a change, prayed for the mystic treasure that might come to us from those ships of chance.  Dear, if mine comes first, it brings good for you, too.  You can’t believe that I should forget?”

For the first time in his life he bent over and kissed her upon the lips.  She suffered his caress not only without resistance but for a single moment her arms clasped his neck passionately.  Then she drew away abruptly.

“I don’t know what I’m doing!” she panted.  “You mustn’t kiss me like that!  You mustn’t, Arnold!”

She began to cry, but before he could attempt to console her she dashed the tears away.

“Oh, we’re impossible, both of us!” she declared.  “But then, a poor creature like me must always be impossible.  It isn’t quite kind of fate, is it, to give any one a woman’s heart and a woman’s loneliness, and the poor frame of a hopeless invalid.”

“You’re not a hopeless invalid,” he assured her, earnestly.  “No one would ever know, to look at you as you sit there, that there was anything whatever the matter.  Don’t you remember our money-box for the doctor?  Even that will come, Ruth.  The day will come, I am sure, when we shall carry you off to Vienna, or one of those great cities, and the cure will be quite easy.  I believe in it, really.”

She sighed.

“I used to love to hear you talk about it,” she said, “but, somehow, now it seems so far off.  I don’t even know that I want to be like other women.  There is only one thing I do want and that is to keep you.”

“That,” he declared, fervently, “you are sure of.  Remember, Ruth, that awful black month and what we suffered together.  And you knew nothing about me.  I just found you sitting on the stairs with your broken stick, waiting for some one to come and help you.”

She nodded.

“And you picked me up and carried me into your room,” she reminded him.  “You didn’t have to stop and take breath as Isaac has to.”

“Why, no,” he admitted, “I couldn’t say you were heavy, dear.  Some day or other, though,” he added, “you will be.  Don’t lose your faith, Ruth.  Don’t let either of us leave off looking for the ships.”

She smiled.

“Very well,” she said, letting her hand fall once more softly into his, “I think that I am very foolish.  I think that yours has come already, dear, and I am worse than foolish, I am selfish, because I once hoped that they might come together; that you and I might sit here, Arnold, hand in hand, and watch them with great red sails, and piles and piles of gold and beautiful things, with our names written on so big that we could read them even here from the window.”

She burst into a peal of laughter.