mmed over; but still she did not move, did not take
her eyes from her sister's face. She was so strange--as if going out to
Harriett and yet holding herself ready at any moment to crouch back.

"And so," Harriett pursued, all the while in that low voice, "that is
the way I talked to Edgar and Cyrus. I didn't bring Ted into it," she
said, more in her natural way, "because he's just a boy, and then--" she
paused as if she had got into something that embarrassed her--"well, he
and Cyrus not feeling kindly toward each other just now I thought I
could do better without Ted."

Ruth flushed slightly at the mention of the feeling between her
brothers; but still she did not speak, scarcely moved.

Harriett was silent a moment. "That's one of the reasons," she took it
up, "why I am anxious to do something to bring us together. I don't want
Ted to be feeling this way toward Cyrus. And Edgar, too, he seems to be
very bitter against. It makes him defiant. It isn't good for him. I
think Ted has a little disposition to be wild," she said in a
confidential tone.

Ruth spoke then. "I hadn't noticed any such disposition," she said
simply.

"Well, he doesn't go to church. It seems to me he doesn't--accept things
as he ought to."

Ruth said nothing to that, only continued to look at her sister,
waiting.

"So I talked to them," Harriett went on. "Of course, Ruth, there's no
use pretending it was easy. You know how Cyrus feels; he isn't one to
change much, you know." She turned away and her hand fumbled in a little
patch of clover.

"But we do want to do something, Ruth," she came back to it. "We all
feel it's terrible this way. So this is what Edgar proposed, and Cyrus
agreed to it, and it seems to me the best thing to do." She stopped
again, then said, in a blurred sort of voice, fumbling with the clover
and not looking at Ruth: "If you will leave the--your--if you will leave
the man you are--living with, promising never to see him again,--if you
will give that up and come home we will do everything we can to stand by
you, go on as best we can as if nothing had happened. We will try to--"

She looked up--and did not go on, but flushed uncomfortably at sight of
Ruth's face--eyes wide with incredulity, with something like horror.

"You don't _mean_ that, do you, Harriett?" Ruth asked in a queer, quiet
voice.

"But we wanted to do something--" Harriett began, and then again halted,
halted before the sudden blaze of anger in Ruth