n broke down a little--enough for
Louise to ride over it. Oh, yes, in these small towns everybody's
somehow mixed up with everyone else," she laughed. "And of course," she
went on more gravely, "that is where it is hard to answer the people who
seem so hard about Ruth. It isn't just one's self, or even just one's
family--though it broke them pretty completely, you know; but a thing
like that reaches out into so many places--hurts so many lives."

"Yes," said Amy, "it does." She was thinking of her own life, of how it
was clouding her happiness.

"One has to admit," said Cora, in the tone of summing it all up, "that
just taking one's own happiness is thorough selfishness. Society as a
whole is greater than the individual, isn't it?"

That seemed to Amy the heart of it. She felt herself as one within
society, herself faithful to it and guarding it against all who would do
it harm; hard to the traitor, not because of any personal feeling--she
wished to make that clear to herself--but because society as a whole
demanded that hardness. After she had bade Cora good-by and as she was
about to open the door of the house Deane had prepared for her, she told
herself that it was a matter of taking the larger view. She was pleased
with the phrase; it seemed to clear her own feeling of any possible
charge of smallness.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Despite the fact that he knew he was going to be late getting home for
dinner, Dr. Franklin was sending his car very slowly along the
twelve-mile stretch of road that lay between him and home. This was not
so much because it was beautiful country through which he went, and the
spring freshness in the softness of late afternoon was grateful to him,
nor because too tired for any kind of hurrying, as it was that he did
not want to cover those twelve miles before he had thought out what he
was going to say to Amy.

He had seen Ruth that afternoon. He went, as usual, to see her father,
and as he entered the room Ruth was sitting beside the bed. She sat with
her back to him and did not seem to know at once that he was there. She
was bending forward, elbow on her knee, hand to her face, looking at her
father who was asleep, or, rather, in that stupor with which death
reaches out into life, through which the living are drawn to the dead.
She was sitting very still, intent, as she watched the man whom life was
letting go.

He had not seen Ruth since that night, eleven years before, when she