He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but,
after a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he
came. "And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?" she
said; "and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and field?"
His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch
of mock irony: "The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of
the house of Devlin."
"Oh," she said, "you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished
satire on a woman." And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with
which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had
ever happened to her.
"No, indeed no," he replied, "though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am
malicious--just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: 'Rome turned
upon itself.'"
"But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of it.
Yours did not seem applied to yourself," was her slow answer, and she
seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.
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