If I was--" His voice died away.

His firmly planned intention had come to a halt on the verge of the horrible probability that he should have asked Arthur and that he had made a fool of himself.

Ruth did not speak immediately.
She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile the stumbling, uncouth speech and its simplicity of thought with what she saw in his face.

She had never looked in eyes that expressed greater power.

Here was a man who could do anything, was the message she read there, and it accorded ill with the weakness of his spoken thought.