ere was little force left for fighting pneumonia.
Certainly it was a broken life!"--that last was less gently said.

Exasperation showed in his shifting of position.

"It needn't have been," he muttered stubbornly.

"Deane--Deane!" she murmured, as if in reproach for something of long
standing. There was a silence in which the whole thing was alive there
for those of them who knew. Cora and Edith, sitting close together, did
not turn to one another. He wondered if they were thinking of the
countless times Ruth had been on that porch with them in the years they
were all growing up together. Edith's face was turned away from the
light now. Suddenly Cora demanded: "Well, there's no prospect at all of
a divorce?"

Mrs. Lawrence rose and went over to Amy and opened a lively conversation
as to whether she found her new maid satisfactory. It left him and Edith
and Cora to themselves.

"No," he answered her question, "I guess not. Not that I know of."

"How terrible it all is!" Cora exclaimed, not without feeling; and then,
following a pause, she and Edith were speaking of how unbecoming the new
hats were, talking of the tea one of their old friends was giving for
Cora next day.

He sat there thinking how it was usually those little things that closed
in over Ruth. When the thought of her, feeling about her, broke through,
it was soon covered over with--oh, discussion of how some one was
wearing her hair, the health of some one's baby or merits of some one's
cook.

He listened to their talk about the changes there had been in Freeport
in the last ten or twelve years. They spoke of deaths, of marriages, of
births; of people who had prospered and people who had gone to pieces;
of the growth of the town, of new people, of people who had moved away.
In a word, they spoke of change. Edith would refer things to him and he
occasionally joined in the talk, but he was thinking less of the
incidents they spoke of than of how it was change they were talking
about. This enumeration of changes gave him a sense of life as a
continuous moving on, as a thing going swiftly by. Life had changed for
all those people they were telling Cora about. It had changed for
themselves too. He had continued to think of Edith and the others as
girls. But they had moved on from that; they were moving on all the
time. Why, they were over thirty! As a matter of fact they were women
near the middle thirties. People talked so lightly of change, and yet