I don't know how it all would have come out, if Mrs. Sewall hadn't interrupted matters. Suddenly, right in the midst of the thickest of our discussion, three or four days after Ruth's announcement, Mrs. Sewall decided to go abroad. She closed up her summer mansion, mid-season though it was, barred the windows, locked the gates, and sailed away to Europe, Breck and all. She didn't come back for two years, and even then she didn't come back to Hilton. The excitement about Breck and Ruth died down like fire, and about as suddenly. He didn't even write to Ruth after three or four months, and just before Ruth came down to visit me and announced her startling piece of news, I had read that Breckenridge Sewall was reported engaged to his cousin, Miss Gale somebody or other, a débutante of last season. Ruth's news was an awful shock to me. I knew without being told how jubilant Edith would be, how helpless Alec in the face of what seemed to both the women of his household such a brilliant victory. I didn't know what to do. It didn't seem as if I could stand by and watch my own sister marry the kind of man Will said that Breck Sewall was. I lay awake a long while that night after Ruth's arrival at our house, wondering what under heaven I, whose ideas on life my sister considered so provincial--what there was that _I_ might do to swerve her from her purpose. I could hope for no help from Will. Ruth had thrown him utterly out of sympathy with her. He washed his hands of the whole affair; he told me so that night when we came upstairs to bed, and I knew by his manner to my sister the next morning at breakfast, courteous enough though it was, in what contempt he held her. I told Will I couldn't send Ruth back to Hilton, and, as distasteful as I knew Breck Sewall's coming to our door would be to him, I hoped he would let me keep Ruth with me as long as she would stay. I didn't have any plan, any deep-laid scheme. It simply seemed to me that it must have been an act of heaven that Ruth had been sent to me during such a critical period in her history, and I didn't want to fly in the face of Providence. I began by being just as nice and kind to her as I knew how. I didn't offer one word of opposition; I didn't advise; I didn't criticise; I appeared even to welcome her suitor when he first arrived to carry my sister in town to dinner and the theatre; I chatted with him pleasantly while she put on her party coat upstairs. I served Ruth breakfasts in bed at eleven A. M.; and admired and praised all her gowns and lovely fol-de-rols as she dressed every afternoon in preparation for her lover.