He held up a legal looking paper. "Official notice," he said. Then suddenly he threw the thing over on the table and with a short hard laugh pulled his chair around to the fire. Ruth stood a moment looking at it lying there. Then she turned and went back to the dishes. When she returned to the living-room the paper still lay there on the table. She had some darning to do and she got out her things and sat down, chair turned to one side, not facing the legal looking doc.u.ment.

After a little while Stuart, who had been figuring in a memorandum book, yawned and said he guessed he'd go to bed. He shook down the fire, then got up and picked up the paper from the table, folded it and took it over to the big desk in the corner where his business things were.

"Well, Ruth," he remarked, "this would have meant a good deal to us ten or twelve years ago, wouldn't it?"

She nodded, her head bent over the sock she was darning.

"Oh, well," he said, after a pause, "maybe it will help some even yet."

She made no answer.

"I suppose Marion wants to get married," he went on meditatively, after a moment adding bitterly, "Her wanting it is the only thing that would ever make her do it."

He went down cellar for coal, and after he had filled the stove began undressing before it. When ready for bed he sat there a little before the fire, as if taking in all the heat he could for the night. Ruth had finished her darning and was putting the things away. "Coming to bed?"

he asked of her.

"Not right away," she said, her voice restrained.

"Better not try to sit up late, Ruth," he said kindly. "You need plenty of sleep. I notice you're often pretty tired at night."

She did not reply, putting things in the machine drawer. Her back was to him. "Well, Ruth," he said, in a voice genial but slightly ironic, "we can get married now."

She went on doing things and still did not speak.

"Better late than never," he said pleasantly, yawning.

He stood up, ready for going into the bedroom, but still hating to leave the fire, standing there with his back to it. "When shall we get married, Ruth?" he went on, in a slightly amused voice.

"Oh, I don't know, Stuart," she replied shortly from the kitchen.

"Have to plan it out," he said sleepily, yawning once more. Then he laughed, as if the idea more and more amused him. After that he murmured, in the voice of one mildly curious about a thing, "I wonder if Marion _is_ going to get married?"

Ruth wanted to take a bath before she went to bed. Taking a bath was no easy matter under their circ.u.mstances. It was so much work and usually she was so tired that she would sometimes let it go longer than she would have supposed she would ever let bathing go. She was determined not to let it go tonight. She had the water on heating; she went down for the tub, went upstairs into her frigid room for the fresh things to put on in the morning. The room was so cold that there was a sort of horror about it. She went over to the window; the snow made the valley bright. Dimly she could see a ma.s.sed thing--the huddled sheep. With a hard little laugh for the sob that shook her she hurried out of the room.

She took her bath before the fire in the living-room. Stuart had piled on one chair the clothes that he had taken off and would put on in the morning. She placed on another the things for herself. And suddenly she looked at those two chairs and the thing that she had been trying not to think about--that now they two could be married--seemed to sear her whole soul with mockery. She was rubbing some lotion on her red, chapped hands, hands defaced by work and cold. She had a picture of her hands as they used to be--back there in those years when to have been free to marry Stuart would have made life radiant. She sat a long time before the fire, not wanting to go to bed. She particularly wanted to go to bed alone that night. There seemed something shameful in that night sharing a bed as a matter of expediency. Stuart was snoring a little. She sat there, her face buried in her hands. The wind was beating against the house. It was beating against the sheep out there, too--it had a clean sweep against that outer rim of living things. She cried for a little while; and then, so utterly tired that it did not matter much, she went in the other room and crept into bed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

But at last the cold had let go of them. It was April, the snow had gone and the air promised that even to that valley spring would come. Ruth, out feeding the chickens, felt that spring nearness. She raised her face gratefully to the breeze. It had seemed almost unbelievable that the wind would ever again bring anything but blighting cold.

As she stood there, held by that first feel of spring, an automobile came along, slowed, and Stuart went running out of the house to meet it.

It was his friend Stoddard, a real-estate man there. He had become friends with this man in the last few months. He had had little in friendships with men and this had brightened him amazingly. He had a new interest in business things, new hopes. It had seemed to make him younger, keener. He and Mr. Stoddard had a plan for going into Montana where the latter was interested in a land developing company, and going into business together. Stuart was alive with interest in it; it promised new things for him, a new chance. They would live in a town, and it would be business life, which he cared for as he had never come to care for ranching. He was beginning to talk to Ruth about moving, of selling off their stock and some of their things. He was eager to make the change.

She had gone in the house as the machine stopped, having seen that there were people in the car with Mr. Stoddard and not feeling presentably dressed. She went upstairs to do the work and as she glanced down from the upper window she saw Stuart in laughing conversation with a girl in the automobile. Something about it arrested her. He was standing to the far side of the machine so she could see his face. There was something in it she had not seen for a long time--that interest in women, an unmistakable pleasure in talking with an attractive girl. She stood there, a little back from the window, watching them. There was nothing at all wrong about it; nothing to resent, simply a little gay bantering with a girl. It was natural to him; it had been once, it could be again.

His laugh came up to her. So he could still laugh like that; she had not heard him for a long time. He turned and started hurriedly for the house, the car waiting for him. He was smiling, his step was buoyant.

"Ruth," he called up to her, and his voice too had the old buoyancy, "I'm going into town with Stoddard. We want to go over some things.

He'll bring me back before night."

"All right, Stuart," she called back pleasantly.

She watched the car out of sight. Stuart, sitting in the front seat with his friend, had turned and was gayly talking with the women behind. When she first knew him, when she was still a little girl and used to see him around with his own set, he had been like that.

She did not want to stay in the house. That house had shut her in all winter. The road stretched invitingly away. About a mile down it there was a creek, willows grew there. Perhaps there she would find some real spring. Anyway she had an impulse to get out to the moving water. She had seemed locked in, everything had seemed locked in for so long.

As she was getting her coat she put into the pocket a letter she had received the day before from Deane Franklin. After she had sat a little while by the running water she took the letter out to reread, but did not at first open it. She was wishing Deane were sitting there with her.

She would like to talk to him.

This letter was a gloomy one. It seemed that Deane too was locked in.

Soon after Ted came back from Freeport in the fall she had got it out of him about the Franklins. She had sensed at once that there was something about Deane he did not want to tell her, and before he left for his own place she had it from him that the Franklins had indeed separated, and that the gossip of Freeport was that it was because of Mrs. Franklin's resentment of her. And that was one of the things had seemed to make it possible for the winter somehow to _take_ her; that was the thing had seemed to close the last door to her spirit, the last of those doors that had been thrown wide open when she left Annie's home in Freeport the spring before.

She had tried to write to Deane. She felt that she should write to him, but she had a feeling of powerlessness. Finally, only a little while before, she had brought herself to do it. She knew it was a poor letter, a halting, constrained thing, but it seemed the best she could do, and so finally, after a great deal of uncertainty, she sent it.

His reply made her feel that he realized how it had been, why she had been so long in writing, why the letter had been the stilted thing it was. It gave her a feeling that her friend had not withdrawn from her because of what she had brought down upon him, that that open channel between him and her was there as it had ever been. And though his letter did not make her happy, it loosened something in her to be able to feel that the way between her and Deane was not closed.

"Don't distress yourself, Ruth," she now reread, "or have it upon your spirit, where too much has lain heavy all these years. You want to know the truth, and the truth is that Amy did resent my feeling about you--about you and your situation--and that put us apart. But you see it was not in us to stay together, or we could not have been thus put apart. Love can't do it all, Ruth--not for long; I mean love that hasn't roots down in the spirit can't. And where there isn't that spiritual underneath, without a hinterland, love is pretty insecure.

"I could have held on to it a while longer, I suppose, by cutting clear loose from the thing really me. And I suppose I would have done it if I could--I did in fact make attempts at it--but that me-ness, I'm afraid, is most infernal strong in my miserable make-up. And somehow the withdrawal of one's self seems a lot to pay for even the happiness of love. There are some of us can't seem able to do it.

"So it's not you, Ruth; it's that it was like that, and that it came out through the controversy about you. Cast from your mind any feeling adding the wrecking of my happiness to your list of crimes.

"But, Ruth, I'm _not_ happy. I couldn't get along in happiness, and I don't get along without it. It's a paralyzing thing not to have happiness--or to lose it, rather. Does it ever seem to you that life is a pretty paralyzing thing? That little by little--a little here and a little there--it _gets_ us? We get harness-broke, you see. Seems to have gone that way with most of the people I know. Seems to be that way with me. Don't let it do it to you!

"Somehow I don't believe it will. I think that you, Ruth, would be a fine little prison-breaker. Might stand some show of being one myself if I were anywhere but in this town. There's something about it that has _got_ me, Ruth. If it hadn't--I'd be getting out of it now.

"But of course I'm a pretty poor sort, not worth making a fight for, or it wouldn't be like this. And--for that matter--what's the difference?

Lives aren't counting for much these days--men who _are_ the right sort going down by the thousands, by the hundred of thousands, so what--for heaven's sake--does it matter about me?

"I wish I could see you!

"I'm glad for you about the divorce. I believe the case comes up this April term, so it may be all over by the time you get this letter.

Pretty late in coming, and I suppose it must seem a good deal of a mockery--getting it now--but maybe it will help some for the future, make you feel more comfortable, and I'm awfully glad.

"Funny about it, isn't it? I wonder what made her do it! I was called there this winter, maid sick--miscarriage--and Mrs. Williams puzzled me.

Didn't turn the girl out, awfully decent to her. I would have supposed she would have been quite the other way. And now this. Queer, don't you think?

"Write to me sometimes, Ruth. Sometimes write to me what you're thinking about. Maybe it will stir me up. Write to me to take a brace and get out of this town! If you went for me hard enough, called me all the insulting names you could think of, and told me a living dead man was the most cowardly and most disgusting object cluttering up the earth, you might get a rise out of me. You're the one could do it, if it can be done.

"One thing I _do_ know--writing this has made me want like blazes to see you!

"DEANE."

Ruth sat there in the arm of a low willow, her hands resting upon Deane's letter, her eyes closed, the faint breath of coming spring upon her face. She was tired and very sad. She was thinking of Deane's life, of her own life, of the way one seemed mocked. She wished that Deane were there; she could talk to him and she would like to talk. His letter moved something in her, something that had long seemed locked in stirred a little. Her feeling about life had seemed a thing frozen within her.

Now the feeling that there was still this open channel between her and Deane was as a thawing, an outlet.