se that night and she had no power
to go on dissembling.

It began in irritation at him, the vicious irritation that springs out
against the person who upsets a plan he knows nothing about, and cannot
be told of.

She had come in from an errand down town and was about to dress
hurriedly to go over to Edith's for dinner. She was going to make some
excuse for getting away from there early and would have an hour with
Stuart, one of those stolen hours that often crowded, agitated, a number
of the hours before it, one of those hours of happiness when fear always
stood right there, but when joy had a marvellous power to glow in an
atmosphere of ugly things. A few nights before she had tried to arrange
one of those times, and just as she was about to leave the house, saying
some vague thing about running in somewhere--there was no strict
surveillance on members of the Holland household--a friend who had been
very ill and was just beginning to go about had come to see her and she
had been obliged to sit there through the hour she had been living for,
striving to crowd down what she was feeling and appear delighted that
her friend was able to be about, chatting lightly of inconsequential
things while she could think of nothing but Stuart waiting for her, had
had to smile while she wanted to sob in the fury of disappointed
passion.

The year had brought many disappointments like that, disappointments
which found their way farther into the spirit because they dared not
show on the surface. Of late there had been so many of them that it was
growing hard to hold from her manner her inner chafing against them.
There were times when all the people who loved her seemed trying to
throw things in her way, and it was the more maddening because blindly
done. It was hurting her relations with people; she hated them when they
blunderingly stepped in the way of the thing that had come to mean
everything to her.

She was particularly anxious about this night for Stuart was going out
of town on a business trip and she would not see him again for more than
a week. It was her grandfather who made the first difficulty; as she was
going up the stairs he called, "You going over to the Lawrences'
tonight, Ruth?"

When she had answered yes he continued: "It wouldn't be much out of your
way, would it, to run on over to the Allens'?"

She hesitated; anything her grandfather asked of her was hard to refuse,
not only because she loved him and beca