Stuart was silent, head down. After a moment he looked up at Deane. It was a look one would turn quickly away from. Again Deane stood looking from the window. He was considering something, considering a thing that would be very hard to do. After a moment he again abruptly turned around. "Well, shall I do it!" he asked quietly.
The man nodded in a wretched gratefulness that went to Deane's heart.
So he called Ruth in from the waiting-room. He always remembered just how Ruth looked that day; she had on a blue suit and a hat with flowers on it that was very becoming to her. She looked very girlish; he had a sudden sense of all the years he had known her.
The smile with which she greeted Deane changed when she saw Stuart sitting there; the instant's pleased surprise went to apprehension at sight of his face. "What's the matter!" she asked sharply.
"Stuart's rather bummed up, Ruth," said Deane.
Swiftly she moved over to the man she loved. "What is it!" she demanded in quick, frightened voice.
"Oh, just a bad lung," Deane continued, not looking at them and speaking with that false cheerfulness so hard fought for and of so little worth. "Don't amount to much--happens often--but, well--well, you see, he has to go away--for awhile."
He was bending over his desk, fumbling among some papers. There was no sound in the room and at last he looked up. Stuart was not looking at Ruth and Ruth was standing there very still. When she spoke her voice was singularly quiet. "When shall we go?" she asked.
Everyone who talked about it--and that meant all who knew anything about it--blamed Deane Franklin for not stopping Ruth. Perhaps the reason he did not try to defend himself was simply that he could not hope to show how simple was his acceptance of the fact that it would have been impossible to stop her. To understand that, one would have to have seen. Oh, to be sure, he could have put obstacles in her way, tightened it around her, but anything he might have done would only have gone to making it harder for Ruth to get away; it would not have kept her from going. And after all, he himself saw it as, if not the thing she should do, the thing--it being what it was then--she could not help doing. But one would have to have seen Ruth's face, would need to have been with her in those days to understand that.