g
face and in her shining eyes.

"I don't know whether you are right or wrong, Larry, or rather when you
are right and when you are wrong. It is all mixed up. It seems as if it
must be right to care or we wouldn't be doing it so hard, as if God
couldn't let us love like this if he didn't mean we should be happy
together, belong to each other. Why should He make love if He didn't want
lovers to be happy?"

It was an argument as old as the garden of Eden but to Ruth and Larry it
was as if it were being pronounced for the first time for themselves,
here in the dead of night, in the old House on the Hill, as they felt
themselves drawn to each other by the all but irresistible impulse of
their mutual love.

"Maybe," went on Ruth, "I forgot my morals along with the rest I forgot.
I don't seem to care very much about right and wrong to-night. You
called me. I heard you and I came. I am here." Her lovely, proud little
head was thrown back, her eyes still shining with that fearless elation.

"Ruth! Don't, dear. You don't know what you are saying. I've got to care
about right and wrong for both of us. Please go. I--I can't stand it."

He left his post by the table then came forward and held open the door
for her. She passed out, went up the stairs, her hair falling in a wave
of gold down to her waist. She did not turn back.

Larry waited at the foot of the stairs until he heard the door of her
room close upon her and then he too went up, to Granny's room. Ted met
him at the threshold in a panic of fear and grief.

"Larry--I think--oh--" and Ted bolted unable to finish what he had begun
to say or to linger on that threshold of death.

The nurse was bending over Madame Holiday forcing some brandy between the
blue lips. Larry was by the bedside in an instant. The nurse stepped back
with a sad little shake of the head. There was nothing she could do and
she knew it, knew also there was nothing the young doctor could do
professionally. He knelt, chafed the cold hands. The pale lips quivered a
little, the glazed eyes opened for a second.

"Ned--Larry--give Philip love--" That was all. The eyes closed. There was
a little flutter of passing breath. Granny was gone.

It was two days after Granny's funeral. Ted had gone back to college.
Tony would leave for New York on the morrow. Life cannot wait on
death. It must go on its course as inevitably as a river must go its
way to the sea.

Yet to Tony it seemed sad and heartless th