_He_ had been in earnest, sufficiently in earnest to make himself very unhappy, and on her account.
Ruth had known for some time that Dare loved her; but to-night that simple, unobtrusive fact suddenly took larger proportions, came boldly out of the shadow and looked her in the face.
He loved her.

Well, what then?
She turned giddy, and leaned her head against the open shutter.
In the silence the words that had haunted her all the afternoon came back; not loud as heretofore, but in a whisper, speaking to her heart, which had begun to beat fast and loud.
_"We should consider well what we are keeping back our strength for, if we refuse to put the whole of it into our work."_ What work was there for her to do?
The giddiness and the whirl in her mind died down suddenly like a great gust on the surface of a lake, and left it still and clear and cold.
The misery of the world and the inability to meet it had so often confused and weighed her down that she had come back humbly of late to the only possibility with which it was in her power to deal, come back to the well-worn groove of earnest determination to do as much as in her lay, close at hand, when she could find a field to labor in.

And now she suddenly saw, or thought she saw, that she had found it.

She had been very anxious as to whether Dare would do his duty, but till this moment it had never struck her that it might be _her_ duty to help him.
She liked him; and he was poor--too poor to do much for the people who were dependent on him, the poor, struggling people of Vandon.

Their sullen, miserable faces rose up before her, and their crazy houses.
Fever had broken out again in the cottages by the river.