s
sets me free.

"Free to choose," she went on, as he only stared at her. There was a
moment of looking at him out of eyes so full of feeling that they held
back the feeling that had flushed his face. "And my choice," she said,
with a strange steadiness, "is that I now go my way alone."

He spoke then; but it was only to stammer: "Why,--_Ruth!_" Helplessly he
repeated: "_Ruth!_"

"But you see? You do see?" she cried. "If it had _not_ been so much--so
beautiful! Just because it _was_ what it was--" She choked and could not
go on.

He came around and sat down beside her. The seriousness of his face,
something she had touched in him, made it finer than it had been in
those last years of routine. It was more as it used to be. His voice too
seemed out of old days as he said: "Ruth, I don't know yet what you
mean--why you're saying this?"

"I think you do, Stuart," she said simply. "Or I think you will, if
you'll let yourself. It's simply that this--" she touched the envelope
on the table before her--"that this finds us over on the other side of
marriage. And this is what I mean!" she flamed. "I mean that the
marriage between us was too real to go through the mockery this would
make possible now!" She turned away because she was close to tears.

He sat there in silence. Then, "Have I done anything, Ruth?" he asked in
the hesitating way of one at sea.

She shook her head without turning back to him.

"You apparently have got the impression," he went on, a faint touch of
resentment creeping into his voice at having to make the declaration,
"that I don't care any more. That--that isn't so," he said awkwardly and
with a little rise of resentment.

Ruth had turned a little more toward him, but was looking down at her
hands, working with them as if struggling for better control. "I have
no--complaint on that score," she said very low.

"Things change," he went on, with a more open manner of defence. "The
first kind of love doesn't last forever. It doesn't with anyone," he
finished, rather sullenly.

"I know that, Stuart," she said quietly. "I know enough to know that.
But I know this as well. I know that sometimes that first kind of love
leaves a living thing to live by. I know that it does--sometimes. And I
know that with us--it hasn't."

As if stung by that he got up and began walking angrily about the room.
"You're talking nonsense! Why wouldn't we get married, I'd like to know,
after all this time together? We _