must find your way back to life."

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Ruth was very quiet through the next week. Stuart was preoccupied with
the plans he was making for going to Montana; when he talked with her it
was of that, of arrangements to be made for it, and his own absorption
apparently kept him from taking note of her being more quiet than usual,
or different. It was all working out very well. He had found a renter
for the ranch, the prospects for the venture in Montana were good. They
were to move within a month. And one night in late April when he came
home from town he handed Ruth a long envelope, with a laughing, "Better
late than never." Then he was soon deep in some papers.

Ruth was sorting a box of things; there were many things to be gone
through preparatory to moving. She had put the paper announcing his
divorce aside without comment; but she loitered over what she was doing.
She was watching Stuart, thinking about him.

She was thinking with satisfaction that he looked well. He had thrown
off the trouble that had brought about their departure from Freeport
twelve years before. He was growing rather stout; his fair hair had gone
somewhat gray and his face was lined, he had not the look of a young
man. But he looked strong, alert. His new hopes had given him vigor, a
new buoyancy. She sat there thinking of the years she had lived with
him, of the wonder and the happiness she had known through him, of the
hard things they had faced together. Her voice was gentle as she replied
to his inquiry about what day of the month it was.

"I think," he said, "that we can get off by the fifteenth, don't you,
Ruth?"

"Perhaps." Her voice shook a little, but he was following his own
thoughts and did not notice. After a little he came and sat across the
table from her. "And, Ruth, about this getting married business--" He
broke off with a laugh. "Seems absurd, doesn't it?"

She nodded, fumbling with the things in the box, her head bent over
them.

"Well, I was thinking we'd better stop somewhere along the way and
attend to it. Can't do it here--don't want to there."

She lifted her hands from the box and laid them on the table that was
between him and her. She looked over at him and said, quietly, in a
voice that shook only a little: "I do not want to get married, Stuart."

He was filling his pipe and stopped abruptly, spilling the tobacco on
the table. "What did you say?" he asked in the voice of one sure he mu