ed to someone else?" she asked with
rising voice.

Again he only nodded, feeling incapable, when Amy looked at him like
that, of saying the things he would like to be saying for Ruth.

Abruptly she drew her hair away. "And you can sympathize with--_like_--a
person who would do that?"

"I certainly both sympathize with and like Ruth."

That had come quick and sharp, and then suddenly he felt it all wrong
that a thing which had gone so deep into his own life should be coming
to Amy like this, that she should be taking the attitude of the town
against his friend, against his own feeling. He blamed his way of
putting it, telling himself it was absurd to expect her to understand a
bald statement like that. At that moment he realized it was very
important she should understand; not only Ruth, but something in
himself--something counting for much in himself would be shut out if she
did not understand.

It made his voice gentle as he began: "Amy, don't you know that just to
be told of a thing may make it seem very different from what the thing
really was? Seeing a thing from the outside is so different from living
through it. Won't you reserve judgment about Ruth--she is my friend and
I hate to see her unfairly judged--until some time when I can tell it
better?"

"Why have _you_ so much to do with it? Why is it so important I do
not--judge her?" Amy's sweetness, that soft quality that had been dear
to him seemed to have tightened into a hard shrewdness as she asked:
"How did _you_ happen to know it all from within?"

He pushed his chair back from her and settled into it wearily. "Why,
because she was my friend, dear. I was in her confidence."

"I don't think I'd be very proud of being in the confidence of a woman
who ran away with another woman's husband!"

Her hostile voice fanned the old anger that had so many times flamed
when people were speaking hostilely of Ruth. But he managed to say
quietly: "But you see you don't know much about it yet, Amy."

He was facing her mirror and what he saw in it made him lean forward,
his arms about her, with an impulsive: "Sweetheart, we're not going to
quarrel, are we?"

But after his kisses she asked, as if she had only been biding her time
through the interruption; "_Did_ she run away with him?"

His arm dropped from her shoulder. "They left together," he answered
shortly.

"Are they married now?"

"No."

Amy, who had resumed the brushing of her hair, held the brush s