He was on foot, having left his car down at the garage for some repairs after taking his mother home. As he slowed for a moment from a walk that was half run he thought of how useless his hurrying was. What in the world could he do when he got there? Nothing save assure them he could do nothing. Poor Ruth!--it seemed she had so much, so many hard things. This was a time when one needed one's friends, but of course they couldn't come near her--on account of society. Though--his face softened with the thought--Annie Morris would come, she not being oppressed by this duty to society. He thought of the earnestness of her thin face as she talked of Ruth. That let in the picture of Amy's face as he introduced them. He tried not to keep seeing it. He did think, however, that it was pretty unnecessary of Amy to have talked to his mother about Ruth. All that was unyielding in him had been summoned by the way his mother talked to him going home--"going for him" like that because he had wanted Amy to go and see Ruth. That, it seemed to him, was something between him and Amy. He would not have supposed she would be so ready to talk with some one else about a thing that was just between themselves. There had been that same old hardening against his mother when she began talking of Ruth, and that feeling that shut her out excluded Amy with her. And he had wanted Amy with him. Hurrying on, he tried not to think of it. He didn't know why Amy had talked to his mother about it--perhaps it just happened so, perhaps his mother began it. He seized upon that. And Amy didn't understand; she was young--her life had never touched anything like this. He was going to talk to her--really talk to her, not fly off the handle at the first thing she would say. He told himself that he had been stupid, hard--a bungler. It made him feel better to tell himself that. Yes, he certainly had been unsympathetic, and it was a shame that anything had come to make Amy unhappy--and right there at first, too! Why, it was actually making her sick! When he went back after taking his mother home Amy said she had a bad headache and didn't want to talk. She was so queer that he had taken her at her word and had not tried to talk to her--be nice to her. It seemed now that he hadn't been kind; it helped him to feel that he hadn't been kind. And it was the headache, being roused in the night when she was not well that had made her so--well, so wrought up about his answering to the call of the Hollands--old patients, old friends. He was going to be different; he was going to be more tender with Amy--that would be the way to make her understand. Such were the things his troubled mind and hurt heart tried to be persuaded of as, thinking at the same time of other things--the death to which he was hurrying, how hard it would be for Ruth if Cyrus didn't speak to her--he passed swiftly by the last houses where people slept and turned from a world