When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her, sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion, looking up at her from time to time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he was shy about emotional things--awkward; he had had almost no emotional life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved, drawn.
Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding--she was to be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in love with. He associated the light of her face, the sweetness of her voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him, leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her. "You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "_I_ love you."
She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.
"Could you care for me at all, Ruth?" he asked wistfully, and with a bated passionateness.