h there were tears and
clutched her two wrists with his hands. "Ruth," he whispered, "it will
come back. I feel that this has--has brought it back."

The look of old feeling had transformed his face. After barren days it
was sweet to her. It tempted her, tempted her to shut her eyes to what
she knew and sink into the sweetness of believing herself loving and
loved again. Perhaps, for a little time, they could do it. To be deeply
swayed by this common feeling, to go together in an emotion, was like
dear days gone. But it was her very fidelity to those days gone that
made her draw just a little away, and, tears running down her face,
shake her head. She knew too well, and she had the courage of her
knowing. This was something that had seeped up from old feeling; it had
no life of its own. What they were sharing now was grief over a dead
thing that had been theirs together. That grief, that sharing, left them
tender. This was their moment--their moment for leaving it. They must
leave it before it lay there between them both dead and unmourned,
clogging life for them. She whispered to him: "Just because of all it
has meant--let's leave it while we can leave it like this!"

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The man who worked for them had gone ahead in the spring wagon with her
trunk. She was waiting for Ted to hitch the other horse to the buggy and
drive her in to the train. She was all ready and stood there looking
about the house she was leaving. There were things in that room which
they had had since their first years together--that couch, this chair,
had come to them in Arizona in the days when they loved each other with
a passion that made everything else in the world a pale thing before
their love. She stood picking out things that they had had when love was
flaming strong in them and it seemed they two fought together against
the whole world. And as she stood there alone in their place in common
that she was about to leave she was made sick by a sense of
failure--that desolate sense of failure she had tried all along to beat
down. That love had been theirs--and this was what it had come to. That
wonder had been--and it ended in the misery of this leavetaking. She
turned sharply around, opened the door and stood there in the doorway,
her back to the place she was quitting, her pale stern face turned to
the mountains--to that eastern range which she was going to cross. She
tried to draw something from them, draw strength