Ruth sat up and wiped her eyes.  He looked into them, saw them cleared now of dread, and it was a sufficient reward.  For her part, in that instant, Ruth almost loved Bonbright, not as lovers love, but as one loves a benefactor, some one whose virtues have earned affection.  But it was not that sort that Bonbright asked of her, she knew full well.

“Now—­er—­Miss Frazer,” he said, briskly, “I don’t want to appear forward for a new acquaintance, but if I suggested that there was a bully play in town—­sort of tentatively, you know—­what would happen to me?”

“Why, Mr. Foote,” she replied, able to enter into the spirit of the pretense, “I think you’d find yourself in the awkward position of a young man compelled to buy two seats.”

“No chaperons?”

“Where I come from,” she said, “chaperons are not in style.”

“And we’ll go some place after the play. ...I want to make the most of my opportunity, because I’ve got to work all day to-morrow.  It’s a shame, too, because I have a feeling that I’d like to monopolize you.”

“Aren’t you going a bit fast for a comparative stranger?” she asked, merrily.

He pretended to look crestfallen.  “You sha’n’t have to put me in my place again,” he promised; “but wait—­wait till we’ve known each other a week!...Do you know, Miss Frazer, you have a mighty charming smile!”

“It has been remarked before,” she said.

“We mustn’t keep our hostess waiting.  I’m afraid we’ll be late for dinner, now.”  He chuckled at the idea.

“I never have eaten dinner with a man in evening dress,” she said, with a touch of seriousness.  “In the country I come from the men don’t wear them.”  How true that was—­in the country she came from, the country of widows who kept boarding houses, of laborers, of Dulac and their sort!  She was in another land now, a land she had been educated to look upon with enmity; the land of the oppressor.  Little revolutionist—­she was to learn much of that country in the days to come and to know that in it bad men and good men, worthy women and trifling women, existed in about the same ratio as in her own familiar land. ...Bonbright insisted upon buying her violets—­the first costly flowers she had ever worn.  They occupied desirable seats—­and the few plays Ruth had seen she had seen from gallery heights!  Fortunately it was a bright play, brimming with laughter and gayety, presenting no squalid problems, holding up to the shrinking eyes of the audience no far-fetched, impossible tangles of sex.  They enjoyed it.  Ruth enjoyed it.  That she could do so is wonderful, perhaps, but then, so many human capabilities are wonderful!  Men about to be hanged eat a hearty meal with relish. ...  How much more might Ruth find pleasure since she had been granted a reprieve!