nk things couldn't be any different.

She was turning the pages of an old album she had taken from the box of
her mother's things she was sorting. "Oh!" she exclaimed in a low voice,
bending over the pages. Her tone brought Ted over to her. "A picture of
Ruth as a baby," she murmured.

He knelt down and looked over her shoulder into the dusty, old-fashioned
album at a picture of a baby a year or so old whose face was all screwed
up into a delighted laugh, tiny hands raised up and clenched in the
intensity of baby excitement, baby abandonment to the joyousness of
existence.

"She _was_ like that," murmured Harriett, a little tremulously. "She was
the _crowingest_ baby!"

They bent over it in silence for a minute. "Seems pretty tickled about
things, doesn't she?" said Ted with a queer little laugh. Harriett
sighed heavily, but a moment later a tear had fallen down to one of the
baby hands clenched in joyousness; the tear made him forgive the sigh,
and when he saw her carefully take the picture from the album and put it
in the pocket of her big apron, it was a lot easier, somehow, to go on
working with Harriett. It was even easy, after a little, to ask her what
he wanted to know about Deane's practice.

It was true, she feared, that the talk had hurt him some. Mrs. Lawrence
had stopped having him. It seemed she had taken a great fancy to Amy
Franklin and felt keenly for her in this. She had made other people feel
that Deane had not been fair or kind and so there was some feeling
against him.

"I suppose she can't claim," Ted cried hotly, "that it hurts him as a
doctor?"

"No," Harriett began uncertainly, "except that a doctor--of course the
personal side of things--"

"Now, there you _go_, Harriett," he interrupted furiously. "You make me
_tired_! If it wasn't that you've a sneaking feeling for Ruth you'd fall
for such a thing yourself!"

"There's no use trying to talk to you, Ted," said Harriett patiently.

Two days later the house was about dismantled. Ted was leaving the next
day for the West. He was so sick of the whole thing that it had gone a
little easier toward the last, blunted to everything but getting things
done. When Harriett, her eyes reddened, came downstairs with a _doll_
and wanted to know if he didn't think Ruth might like to have it, saying
that it was the doll Ruth had loved all through her little girl days,
and that she had just come upon it where her mother had carefully packed
it away, h