He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Her cheeks were blazing. Her eyes were flashing with indignation. It was plain that her patience with the men who had hampered and hindered the rector of Christ Church in his work of saving the bodies and souls of the poor was exhausted.
"Thank you!" he said. "That was not pious, but it was most comforting."
He went and sat down opposite to her at the library table on which her hands were lying as she faced him.
"And you have been my comfort," he added, "through all these dreadful weeks."
"I am glad," she replied, "that I could be of service to you." But the aggressive note in her voice was gone, and her eyes were turned from him.
He reached over and took her hands, one in each of his.
"You have been my mainstay," he said. "I could not have done my work without you. I could not have lived through it without you."
Extravagant, unwise, impulsive, he did not realize the depth of the meaning of his words. But she did. Her eyes met his and fell. Her cheeks paled. Her hands lay limp in his. It was but a moment. Some gentlemanly instinct moved him, some high-born spirit of noblesse oblige, some God-given sense of what a pure-hearted man owes to himself. He released her hands and rose from his chair.
"I must leave you," he said, "and go to the workmen's meeting at Carpenter's Hall. It is already past time." And he added: "Will you not wait and see Mrs. Farrar? You can help her. She is very despondent and wretched. Give her some cheering thought. I will ask her to come in."
He left the room, and in it he left his visitor alone.
Five minutes is not a long time within which to grasp one's soul and draw it back from the brink of disaster. But Ruth Tracy had always been quick and
