st
have heard wrong.

"I said," she repeated, "that I did not want to get married."

He stared at her, his face screwed up. Then it relaxed a little. "Oh,
yes--yes, I know how you feel. It seems so absurd--after all this
time--after all there has been. But we must attend to it, Ruth. It's
right that we should--now that we can. God knows we wanted to bad
enough--long ago. And it will make us feel better about going into a new
place. We can face people better." He gathered up the tobacco he had
spilled and put it in his pipe.

For a moment she did not speak. Then, "That wasn't what I meant,
Stuart," she said, falteringly.

"Well, then, what in the world _do_ you mean?" he asked impatiently.

She did not at once say what she meant. Her eyes held him, they were so
strangely steady. "Just why would we be getting married, Stuart?" she
asked simply.

At first he could only stare at her, appeared to be waiting for her to
throw light on what she had asked. When she did not do that he moved
impatiently, as if resentful of being quizzed this way. "Why--why,
because we can now. Because it's the thing to do. Because it will be
expected of us," he concluded, with gathering impatience for this
unnecessary explanation.

A faint smile traced itself about Ruth's mouth. It made her face very
sad as she said: "I do not seem to be anxious to marry for any of those
reasons, Stuart."

"Ruth, what are you driving at?" he demanded, thoroughly vexed at the
way she had bewildered him.

"This is what I am driving at, Stuart," she began, a little more
spiritedly. But then she stopped, as if dumb before it. She looked over
at him as if hoping her eyes would tell it for her. But as he continued
in that look of waiting, impatient bewilderment she sighed and turned a
little away. "Don't you think, Stuart," she asked, her voice low, "that
the future is rather too important a thing to be given up to ratifying
the past?"

He pushed his chair back in impatience that was mounting to anger. "Just
what do you mean?" he asked, stiffly.

She picked up the long envelope lying on the table between them. She
held it in her hand a moment without speaking. For as she touched it she
had a sense of what it would have meant to have held it in her hand
twelve years before, over on the other side of their life together, a
new sense of the irony and the pity of not having had it then--and
having it now. She laid it down between them. "To me," she said, "thi