Trenchard was less assured, but Wilding laughed at the old rake's
forebodings, and serenely went about the business of his marriage.

On the eve of the wedding he paid Ruth his last visit in the quality
of a lover, and was received by her in the garden. He found her
looking paler than her wont, and there was a cloud of sadness on her
brow, a haunting sadness in her eyes. It touched him to the soul,
and for a moment he wavered in his purpose. He stood beside her - she
seated on the old lichened seat - and a silence fell between them,
during which Mr. Wilding's conscience wrestled with his stronger
passion. It was his habit to be glib, talking incessantly what time
he was in her company, and seeing to it that his talk was shallow
and touched at nothing belonging to the deeps of human life. Thus
was it, perhaps, that this sudden and enduring silence affected her
most oddly; it was as if she had absorbed some notion of what was
passing in his mind. She looked up suddenly into his face, so white
and so composed. Their eyes met, and he stooped to her suddenly, his
long brown ringlets tumbling forward. She feared his kiss, yet never
moved, staring up with fixed, dilated eyes as if fascinated by his
dark, brooding gaze. He paused, hovering above her upturned face as
hovers the hawk above the dove.

"Child," he said at last, and his voice was soft and winning from very
sadness, "child, why do you fear me?"

The truth of it went home to her. She feared him; she feared the
strength that lay behind that calm; she feared the masterfulness
of his wild but inscrutably hidden nature; she was afraid to surrender
to such a man as this, afraid that in the hot crucible of his love
her own nature would be dissolved, transmuted, and rendered part of