inquire after the man Pennicut. Ruth, this is Mr. Winfield. Mr.
Winfield, my niece, Miss Bannister."

And Kirk perceived for the first time that his visitor was not alone.
In the shadow behind her a girl was standing. He stood aside to let
Mrs. Porter pass, and Ruth came into the light.

If there are degrees in speechlessness, Kirk's aphasia became doubled
and trebled at the sight of her. It seemed to him that he went all to
pieces, as if he had received a violent blow. Curious physical changes
were taking place in him. His legs, which only that morning he had
looked upon as eminently muscular, he now discovered to be composed of
some curiously unstable jelly.

He also perceived--a fact which he had never before suspected--that he
had heart-disease. His lungs, too, were in poor condition; he found it
practically impossible to breathe. The violent trembling fit which
assailed him he attributed to general organic weakness.

He gaped at Ruth.

Ruth, outwardly, remained unaffected by the meeting, but inwardly she
was feeling precisely the same sensation of smallness which had come to
Mrs. Porter on her first meeting with Kirk. If this sensation had been
novel to Mrs. Porter, it was even stranger to Ruth.

To think humbly of herself was an experience that seldom happened to
her. She was perfectly aware that her beauty was remarkable even in a
city of beautiful women, and it was rarely that she permitted her
knowledge of that fact to escape her. Her beauty, to her, was a natural