“But I haven’t misunderstood you.”  He saw the lips quiver, but it was anger, he thought, that caused it.

“Yes, you have!”—­a great lump had risen in her throat.  “You have done a brave, noble act,—­everybody says so; you carried my dear father out on your back when there was not but one chance in a thousand you would ever get out alive; you lay in a faint for hours and once they gave you up for dead; then you thought enough of Uncle Peter and all of us to get that telegram sent so we wouldn’t be terrified to death and then at the risk of your life you met us at the station and have been in bed ever since, and yet I am to sit still and not say a word!” It was all she could do to control herself.  “I do feel grateful to you and I always shall feel grateful to you as long as I live.  And now will you take my hand and tell me you are sorry, and let me say it all over again, and with my whole heart? for that’s the way I mean it.”

She was facing him now, her hand held out, her head thrown back, her dark eyes flashing, her bosom heaving.  Slowly and reverently, as a devotee would kiss the robe of a passing priest, Jack bent his head and touched her fingers with his lips.

Then, raising his eyes to hers, he asked, “And is that all, Miss Ruth?  Isn’t there something more?” Not once had she mentioned his own safety—­not once had she been glad over him—­“Something more?” he repeated, an ineffable tenderness in his tones—­“something—­it isn’t all, is it?”

“Why, how can I say anything more?” she murmured in a lowered voice, withdrawing her hand as the sound of a step in the hall reached her ear.

The door swung wide:  “Well, what are you two young people quarrelling about?” came a soft, purring voice.

“We weren’t quarrelling, Aunty.  Mr. Breen is so modest he doesn’t want anybody to thank him, and I just would.”

Miss Felicia felt that she had entered just in time.  Scarred and penniless heroes fresh from battle-fields of glory and desirable young women whose fathers have been carried bodily out of burning death pits must never be left too long together.

CHAPTER XVIII

As the weeks rolled by, two questions constantly rose in Ruth’s mind:  Why had he not wanted her to thank him?—­and what had he meant by—­“And is that all?”

Her other admirers—­and there had been many in her Maryland home—­ had never behaved like this.  Was it because they liked her better than she liked them?  The fact was—­and she might as well admit it once for all—­that Jack did not like her at all, he really DISliked her, and only his loyalty to her father and that inborn courtesy which made him polite to every woman he met—­young or old—­prevented his betraying himself.  She tried to suggest something like this to Miss Felicia, but that good woman had only said:  “Men are queer, my dear, and these Southerners are the queerest of them all.  They are so chivalrous that at times they get tiresome.  Breen is no better than the rest of them.”  This had ended it with Miss Felicia.  Nor would she ever mention his name to her again.  Jack was not tiresome; on the contrary, he was the soul of honor and as brave as he could be—­a conclusion quite as illogical as that of her would-be adviser.