that. And it
was not only that he saw that the man was sick and broken; it was that
he saw that Stuart, just as Ruth, had gone in love beyond his power to
control love, that he was mastered, not master, now. And in those last
days, at least, it was Ruth who dominated him. There was something
terrible in the simplicity with which she saw that she had to go; she
never once admitted it to the things that were to be argued about. He
talked to her, they both tried to talk to her, about the danger of
getting tuberculosis. When he began on that she laughed in his face--and
he could not blame her. As if _that_ could keep her! And as she laughed
her tortured eyes seemed mockingly to put to him--"What difference would
it make?"

When, after it all came out, he did not join the outraged town in the
outcry against Ruth, when it further transpired that he had known about
her going and had not tried to stop it, he was so much blamed that it
even hurt his practice. There were women who said they would not
countenance a young physician who had the ideas of life he must have.
His own people were incensed at what they called the shameful advantage
Ruth had taken of him, holding that she, as an evil woman, had exerted
an influence over him that made him do what was against his own nature.
As to the Hollands, there had been a stormy hour with Mr. Holland and
Cyrus, and a far worse half hour with Mrs. Holland, when her utterly
stricken face seemed to stiffen in his throat the things he wanted to
say for Ruth, things that might have helped Ruth's mother. And then he
was told that the Hollands were through, not alone with Ruth, but with
him.

But he was called there two years later when Mrs. Holland was dying. She
had been begging for him. That moved him deeply because of what in
itself it told of her long yearning for Ruth. After that there were a
number of years when he was not inside that gate. Cyrus did not speak to
him and the father might as well not have done so. He was amazed, then,
when Mr. Holland finally came to him about his own health. "I've come to
you, Deane," he said, "because I think you're the best doctor in town
now--and I need help." And then he added, and after that first talk this
was the closest to speaking of it they ever came: "And I guess you
didn't understand, Deane; didn't see it right. You were young--and
you're a queer one, anyway."

Perhaps the reason he was never able to do better in explaining himself,
or