om she saw that there were several groups in which people
were drawn a little closer together and appeared to be speaking a little
more intimately than was usual upon such an occasion. She felt that Mrs.
Williams' face became more impassive. A moment later she had come over
to Amy and was holding out her hand. There seemed to Amy something very
brave about her, dignified, fine, in the way she went right on, bearing
it, holding her own place, keeping silence. She watched her leave the
room with a new sense of outrage against that terrible woman--that woman
Deane stood up for! The resentment which in the past week she had been
trying to put down leaped to new life.

The women around her resumed their talk: of Mrs. Williams, the Holland
family, of the night of Edith's wedding when--in that very house--Ruth
Holland had been there up to the very last minute, taking her place with
the rest of them. They spoke of her betrayal of Edith, her deception of
all her friends, of how she was the very last girl in the world they
would have believed it of.

A little later, when she and Edith were talking with some other guests,
Ruth Holland was mentioned again. "I don't want to talk of Ruth," Edith
said that time; "I'd rather not." There was a catch in her voice and one
of the women impulsively touched her arm. "It was so terrible for you,
dear Edith," she murmured.

"Sometimes," said Edith, "it comes home to me that it was pretty
terrible for Ruth." Again she turned away, leaving an instant's pause
behind her. Then one of the women said, "I think it's simply wonderful
that Edith can have anything but bitterness in her heart for Ruth
Holland! Why there's not another person in town--oh, except Deane
Franklin, of course--"

She caught herself, reddened, then turned to Amy with a quick smile.
"And it's just his sympathetic nature, isn't it? That's exactly
Deane--taking the part of one who's down."

"And then, too, men feel differently about those things," murmured
another one of the young matrons of Deane's crowd.

Their manner of seeming anxious to smooth something over, to get out of
a difficult situation, enraged Amy, not so much against them as because
of there being something that needed smoothing over, because Deane had
put himself and her in a situation that was difficult. How did it
look?--what must people think?--his standing up for a woman the whole
town had turned against! But she was saying with what seemed a sweet
gravi