r minute and then timidly held out his hand.
"Good-by, Mrs. Williams," he said gently.

She took his hand with a queer, choking little laugh and held it very
tight for a minute, as if to steady herself.

His own eyes had dimmed. Then he smiled--a smile that seemed to want to
go ahead and take any offence or hurt from what he was about to say.
"Maybe, Mrs. Williams, that you will come to feel like being fairer to
Ruth than Ruth was to you." His smile widened and he looked very boyish
as he finished, "And that would be _one_ way of getting back, you know!"

CHAPTER THIRTY

Freeport had a revival of interest in Mrs. Stuart Williams that fall.
They talked so much of her in the first years that discussion had pretty
well spent itself, and latterly it had only been rarely--to a stranger,
or when something came up to bring it to them freshly--that they did
more than occasionally repeat the expressions which that first feeling
had created. There was no new thing to say of their feeling about her.
No one had become intimate with her in those years, and that itself
somehow kept the picture. She was unique, and fascinated them in the way
she was one of them and yet apart. The mystery enveloping her made it
mean more than it could have meant through disclosures from her. It kept
it more poignant to speculate about a concealed suffering than it could
have continued to be through discussing confidences. But even
speculation as to what was beneath that unperturbed surface had rather
talked itself out, certainly had lost its keen edge of interest with the
passing of the years.

That fall, however, they began to speak of a change in her. They said
first that she did not look well; then they began to talk about her
manner being different. She had always kept so calm, and now there were
times when she appeared nervous. She had had throughout a certain cold
serenity. Now she was sometimes irritable, disclosing a fretfulness
close under the untroubled surface. She looked older, they said; her
brows knit and there were lines about mouth and eyes. She seemed less
sure of herself. It made interest in her a fresh thing. They wondered if
she were not at last breaking, spoke with a careful show of regret,
concern, but whetted anticipations gave eagerness to voices of sympathy.
They wondered if Ruth Holland's having come home in the Spring, the
feeling of her being in the town, could have been too much of a strain,
preying upon the de