nurse had gone seemed to turn the page.

Ruth had just asked how long Cyrus was going to stay and Ted replied
that he wanted to stay on a week or perhaps more, attending to some
business. She knew how crowded it must be for them at Harriett's, knew
that if she went away Cyrus would come home. There seemed nothing more
to keep her; she would like to be with Ted awhile, but it seemed she
could not do that without continuing a hard condition for them all. They
could settle into a more natural order of things with her not there. It
was time for her to go.

It was hard to have to think that. She would love to have stayed a
little while. She had been away so long--wanting home for so long. She
knew now, facing the going away, how much she had secretly hoped might
result from this trip back home.

She had seen a number of people in the past few days--relatives, old
friends of the family, friends of Ted. She had done better in meeting
them than, just a little while before, she would have thought possible.
Something remained with her from that hour at her mother's grave, that
strange hour when she had seemed to see life from outside, beyond it.
That had summoned something within herself that no personal hurt could
scatter, as if taking her in to something from which no circumstance
could drive her out. She had felt an inner quiet, a steadiness within;
there was power in it, and consolation. It took her out of that feeling
of having no place--no right to a place, the feeling that had made her
wretched and powerless. She was of life; her sure inner sense of the
reality and beauty of that seemed a thing not to be broken down from
without. It was hers, her own. It sustained her; it gave her poise. The
embarrassment of other people gave way before her simple steadiness. She
had had but the one point of contact with them--that of her father's
death; it made her want more, made going away hard. It was hard to leave
all the old things after even this slight touch with them again.

And that new quiet, that new force within was beginning to make for new
thinking. She had thought much about what she had lived through--she
could not help doing that, but she was thinking now with new
questionings. She had not questioned much; she had accepted. What was
gathering within her now was a feeling that a thing so real, so of life
as her love had been should not be a thing to set her apart, should not
be a thing to blight the lives that touched h