for whom life counted, as it counted for
him. After barren, baffled days, days of denial and humiliation, the
sweetness of being desired possessed him overwhelmingly as they stood
there in the still, fragrant night before the darkened house.

He knew that he must go; he _had_ to go; it was go now, or--. But still
he just stood there, unable to do what he knew he should do, reason
trying to get hold of that moment of gathering passion, training
striving to hold life.

It was she who brought them together. With a smothered passionate little
sob she had swayed toward him, and then she was in his arms and he was
kissing her wet eyes, that tender mouth, the slim throbbing throat.

CHAPTER NINE

There followed three years of happiness wrung from wretchedness, years
in which the splendor of love would blaze through the shame of
concealment, when joy was always breaking out through fear, when moments
of beautiful peace trembled there in the ugly web of circumstance. Life
was flooded with beauty by a thing called shameful.

Her affairs as a girl went on just the same; the life on the surface did
not change. She continued as Ruth Holland--the girl who went to parties
with the boys of her own set, one of her particular little circle of
girls, the chum of Edith Lawrence, the girl Deane Franklin liked best.
But a life grew underneath that--all the time growing, crowding. She
appeared to remain a girl after passion had swept her over into
womanhood. To be living through the most determining, most intensifying
experience of life while she appeared only to be resting upon the
surface was the harassing thing she went through in those years before
reality came crashing through pretence and disgrace brought relief.

She talked to but one person in those years. That was Deane. The night
he told her that he loved her she let him see.

That was more than a year after the night Stuart Williams took her home
from that last rehearsal; Deane was through school now and had come home
to practice medicine. She had felt all along that once he was at home
for good she might have to tell Deane; not alone because he would
interfere with her meetings with Stuart, but because it seemed she could
not bear the further strain of pretending with him. And somehow she
would particularly hate pretending with Deane. Though the night she did
let him see it was not that there was any determination for doing so,
but because things had become too ten