at's the matter!" she asked sharply.

"Stuart's rather bummed up, Ruth," said Deane.

Swiftly she moved over to the man she loved. "What is it!" she demanded
in quick, frightened voice.

"Oh, just a bad lung," Deane continued, not looking at them and speaking
with that false cheerfulness so hard fought for and of so little worth.
"Don't amount to much--happens often--but, well--well, you see, he has
to go away--for awhile."

He was bending over his desk, fumbling among some papers. There was no
sound in the room and at last he looked up. Stuart was not looking at
Ruth and Ruth was standing there very still. When she spoke her voice
was singularly quiet. "When shall we go?" she asked.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Everyone who talked about it--and that meant all who knew anything about
it--blamed Deane Franklin for not stopping Ruth. Perhaps the reason he
did not try to defend himself was simply that he could not hope to show
how simple was his acceptance of the fact that it would have been
impossible to stop her. To understand that, one would have to have seen.
Oh, to be sure, he could have put obstacles in her way, tightened it
around her, but anything he might have done would only have gone to
making it harder for Ruth to get away; it would not have kept her from
going. And after all, he himself saw it as, if not the thing she should
do, the thing--it being what it was then--she could not help doing. But
one would have to have seen Ruth's face, would need to have been with
her in those days to understand that.

As to warning her family, as he was so blamed by them and by all the
town for not doing, that would have seemed to him just one of those
things he could have thrown in her way. He did feel that he must try to
talk to her of what it was going to mean to her people; he saw that she
saw, that it had cruel power to make her suffer--and no power to stop
her. Nothing could have stopped her; she was like a maddened
thing--desperate, ruthless, indomitable. She would have fought the
world; she would have let the whole world suffer. Love's fear possessed
her utterly. He had had the feeling all along that it was rushing on to
disaster. He stood back from it now with something like awe: a force not
for him to control.

And he, with it from within, was the only one who did not condemn Stuart
Williams for letting Ruth go. A man, and older than she, they scorned
him for letting an infatuated girl throw her life away like