. He was standing to the
far side of the machine so she could see his face. There was something
in it she had not seen for a long time--that interest in women, an
unmistakable pleasure in talking with an attractive girl. She stood
there, a little back from the window, watching them. There was nothing
at all wrong about it; nothing to resent, simply a little gay bantering
with a girl. It was natural to him; it had been once, it could be again.
His laugh came up to her. So he could still laugh like that; she had not
heard him for a long time. He turned and started hurriedly for the
house, the car waiting for him. He was smiling, his step was buoyant.
"Ruth," he called up to her, and his voice too had the old buoyancy,
"I'm going into town with Stoddard. We want to go over some things.
He'll bring me back before night."

"All right, Stuart," she called back pleasantly.

She watched the car out of sight. Stuart, sitting in the front seat with
his friend, had turned and was gayly talking with the women behind. When
she first knew him, when she was still a little girl and used to see him
around with his own set, he had been like that.

She did not want to stay in the house. That house had shut her in all
winter. The road stretched invitingly away. About a mile down it there
was a creek, willows grew there. Perhaps there she would find some real
spring. Anyway she had an impulse to get out to the moving water. She
had seemed locked in, everything had seemed locked in for so long.

As she was getting her coat she put into the pocket a letter she had
received the day before from Deane Franklin. After she had sat a little
while by the running water she took the letter out to reread, but did
not at first open it. She was wishing Deane were sitting there with her.
She would like to talk to him.

This letter was a gloomy one. It seemed that Deane too was locked in.
Soon after Ted came back from Freeport in the fall she had got it out of
him about the Franklins. She had sensed at once that there was something
about Deane he did not want to tell her, and before he left for his own
place she had it from him that the Franklins had indeed separated, and
that the gossip of Freeport was that it was because of Mrs. Franklin's
resentment of her. And that was one of the things had seemed to make it
possible for the winter somehow to _take_ her; that was the thing had
seemed to close the last door to her spirit, the last of those doors
th