lowing green.

"I love these little hills," Ruth murmured; "so many little hills," she
laughed affectionately--"and so green and blowy and fruitful. With us
it's a great flat valley--a plain, and most of it dry--barren. You have
to do such a lot to make things grow. Here things just love to grow. And
trees!" she laughed.

"But mountains there," suggested Deane.

"Yes, but a long way off from us, and sometimes they seem very stern,
Deane. I've so many times had the feeling I couldn't get beyond them.
Sometimes they have seemed like other things I couldn't hope to cross."
After a little she said: "These little hills are so gentle; this country
so open."

Deane laughed shortly. "Yes, the hills are gentle. The country is open
enough!"

She laughed too. "It is beautiful country, Deane," she said, as if that
were the thing mattering just then. There was an attractive bit of
pasture just ahead of them: a brook ran through it--a lovely little
valley between two of those gentle hills.

Deane was lying on the grass a little way from her--sprawled out in much
his old awkward way, his elbow supporting his head, hat pulled down over
his eyes. It was good to be with him this last afternoon. It seemed so
much as it used to be; in that moment it was almost as if the time in
between had not been. It was strange the way things could fall away
sometimes--great stretches of time fall away and seem, for a little
while, to leave things as they had been long before.

"Well, Ruth," Deane said at last, "so you're going back."

"Going back, Deane," she answered.

So much they did not say seemed to flow into that; the whole thing was
right there, opened, living, between them. It had always been like that
with her and Deane. It was not necessary to say things out to him, as it
was with everyone else. Their thinking, feeling, seemed to come together
naturally, of itself; not a matter of direction. She looked at Deane
stretched out there on the grass--older, different in some ways--today
he looked as if something was worrying him--yet with it all so much the
Deane of old. It kept recurring as strange that, after all there had
been in between, they should be together again, and that it could be as
it used to be. Just as of old, a little thing said could swing them to
thinking, feeling, of which perhaps they did not speak, but which they
consciously shared. Many times through the years there had come times
when she wanted nothing so much as