looking up at her from time to
time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off
from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was
sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by
something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was
drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and
stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling
something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that
had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself
waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things
wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he
was shy about emotional things--awkward; he had had almost no emotional
life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel
and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual
as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her
tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he
had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved,
drawn.

Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him
with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding--she was to
be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was
to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in
love with. He associated the light of her face, the sweetness of her
voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment
his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him,
leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her.
"You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "_I_ love you."

She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain
startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she
just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.

"Could you care for me at all, Ruth?" he asked wistfully, and with a
bated passionateness.

And then she moved, and it seemed that feeling, too, moved in her again;
there was a flow of emotions as she sat looking at him now. And then her
strangely shining eyes were misty; her face quivered a little and very
slowly she shook her head.

"Don't do that, Ruth," he said quickly, in a voice sharp with pain.
"Don't do that! You don't _know_--maybe you hadn't thought about
it-