she raised a proud face for love; love
could bring her disgrace, it could not strip her of her own sense of the
dignity of loving. Her power was in that, in that claim for love that
pain and humiliation could not beat back.

"I notice _he's_ not here," he sneered, still too overwhelmed to be won
from his own rage to her feeling.

"I thought it better for me to come," she said simply, and as she said
it and he remembered her drawn, wretched face in telling him, he was
quieted a little by a sense of what it had cost her to come. "Because,"
she added, "you're my friend, you know."

He did not say anything, miserably wondering what she now thought of him
as her friend.

"Oh, Deane," she broke out, "don't be hard! If you could know what he's
suffering! Being a man--being a little older--what's that? If you can
understand me, Deane, you've got to understand him, too!"

He stood there in silence looking at Ruth as, looking away from him now,
she brooded over that. In this hour of her own humiliation her appeal
was for the man who had brought it upon her. "How you love him!" escaped
from him, in bitterness, and yet marvelling.

She turned to him then in her swift way, again, as on that night of his
first seeing, her face transformed by that flaming claim for love; it
was as if life was shining triumphant through the cloud of misery it had
brought down around her. He could not rage against that look; he had no
scorn for it. It lighted a country between them which words could not
have undarkened. They came together there in that common understanding
of the power and beauty of love. He was suddenly ashamed, humbled,
feeling in her love a quality upon which no shameful circumstance could
encroach. And after that she found relief in words, the words she had
had to deny herself so long. It was as if she found it wonderfully good
to talk, in some little measure linking her love, as love wants to link
itself, with the other people of the world, coming within the human
unit. Things which circumstances had prisoned in her heart, too
intensified by solitude, leaped out like winged things let loose. But in
that hour of talking with him, though words served her well, it was that
proud, flaming claim for love which again and again lighted her face
that brought him into understanding, winning him for her against his own
love of her.

In the year which followed, that last year before circumstances closed
in too tight and they went away