was not there?

I found her sitting, as I had expected, alone. The paper, with the fatal
page uppermost, lay in her lap, as if she had read it and laid it down.
There was only the firelight in the room.

"Come in, dear," she said gladly. "I was just thinking of you and
wondering if such weather did not make you blue. Sit down here by the
fire. It was sweet of you to come in the rain."

She searched my distressed face anxiously as she spoke. I made no reply.
My heart was too full at being comforted when I had come to comfort. As I
sat on a low stool at her side she seemed to divine my mood, for she drew
my head against her knee with a mother touch, and threaded my hair with a
mother hand, and pressed down my eyelids as I have seen her do when she
puts her baby to sleep. And though she must have felt the tears come, she
did not appear to know.

"Dear Ruth," she said, "I have been sitting here thinking about you, and
wondering if you were satisfied, such a loving heart as you have, to face
the rest of your life without the love you deserve. You won't be vexed
with me for speaking of it to you, for you know I am so old-fashioned that
I think love is the only thing in this world worth having. It is all that
I live for. Of course my children love me, but, until they grow older,
theirs is only an instinctive love. It isn't like the love of a husband,
which singles you out of all the other countless women in the world to be
his and only his forever. There is power enough in that thought to nerve
the weakest woman to do a giant's task. The mere fact that you are all in
all, the _only_ woman, to the man you so dearly love, the one person who
can make his world; when you think that your being away from one meal or
out of the house when he comes in will make him miss you till his heart
aches--this will keep down a moan of pain when it is almost beyond
bearing, for fear it might cause him to suffer with you; it will nerve
you to stand up and smile into his eyes when you are ready to drop with
exhaustion. Love, such as a husband's love for his wife, is the most
precious, the most supporting thing a woman can have. You never hear me
talk much about my husband, but he is all this and more to me. I cannot
begin to tell you about it. I read about unhappy marriages--why, I read
a dreadful thing to-night in the paper, which set me to thinking how safe
and happy I am, and how thankful I ought to be that I can trust my
husband so. It was