hing her hair that she turned to him with a little laugh and asked:
"Who is this mysterious Ruth?"

He sighed; he was tired and telling about Ruth seemed a large
undertaking.

Amy colored and turned from him and picked up her brush. "Don't tell me
if you don't want to," she said formally.

His hand went round her bared shoulder. "Dearest! Why, I want to, of
course. It's just that it's a long story, and tonight I'm a little
tired." As she did not respond to that he added: "This was a hard day at
the office."

Amy went on brushing her hair; she did not suggest that he let it go
until another time so he began, "Ruth was a girl who used to live here."

"I gathered that," she replied quietly.

Her tone made no opening for him. "I thought a great deal of her," he
said after a moment.

"Yes, I gathered that too." She said it dryly, and smiled just a little.
He was more conscious than ever of being tired, of its being hard to
tell about Ruth.

"I gathered," said Amy, still faintly smiling, though, her voice went a
trifle higher, "that you thought more of her--" she hesitated, then
amended--"think more of her--than the rest of them do."

He answered simply: "Yes, I believe that's so. Though Edith used to care
a great deal for Ruth," he added meditatively.

"Well, what did she do?" Amy demanded impatiently. "What _is_ it?"

For a moment his cheek went down to her soft hair that was all around
her, in a surge of love for its softness, a swift, deep gratitude for
her loveliness. He wanted to rest there, letting that, for the time,
shut out all else, secure in new happiness and forgetting old hurts.

But he felt her waiting for what she wanted to know and so with an
effort he began: "Why, you see, dear, Ruth--it was pretty tough for
Ruth. Things didn't go right for her--not as they did for Cora and Edith
and the girls of her crowd. She--" Something in the calm of Amy's
waiting made it curiously hard to say, "Ruth couldn't marry the man she
cared for."

"Why not!" she asked dispassionately.

"Why, because it wasn't possible," he answered a little sharply. "She
couldn't marry him because he wasn't divorced," he said bluntly then.

Amy's deep gray eyes, they had seemed so unperturbed, so
unsympathetically calm, were upon him now in a queer, steady way. He
felt himself flushing. "Wasn't divorced?" she said with a little laugh.
"Is that a way of saying he was married?"

He nodded.

"She cared for a man who was marri