But now, in these last few days, swept back into the wreckage she had left, something fluttered to life and beat hard within her spirit, breaking its way through the fearfulness that shut her in and sending itself out in new bolder flights. Not that those outgoings took her away from the place she had devastated; it was out of the poignancy of her feeling about the harm she had done, out of her new grief in it that these new questionings were born. The very fact that she did see so well, and so sorrowingly, what she had done, brought this new feeling that it should not have been that way, that what she had felt, and her fidelity to that feeling--ruthless fidelity though it was--should not have blighted like this. There was something that seemed at the heart of it all in that feeling of not being ashamed in the presence of death--she who had not denied life. Silence had fallen between her and Ted, she saddened in the thought of going away and open to the puzzling things that touched her life at every point; looking at Ted--proud of him--hating to leave him now just when she had found him again, thinking with loving gratefulness and pride of how generous and how understanding he had been with her, how he was at once so boyish and so much more than his years. The fine seriousness of his face tonight made him very dear and very comforting to her. She wanted to keep close to him; she could not bear the thought of again losing him. If her hard visit back home yielded just that she would have had rich gain from it. She began talking with him about what he would do. He talked freely of his work, as if glad to talk of it; he was not satisfied with it, did not think there was much "chance" there for him. Ted had thought he wanted to study law, but his father, in one of his periods of depression, had said he could not finish sending him through college and Ted had gone into one of the big manufactories there. He was in the sales department, and he talked to Ruth of the work. He told her of his friends, of what they were doing; they talked of many things, speaking of the future with that gentle intimacy there can be between those sorrowing together for things past. Their sensitive consciousness of the emptiness of the house--the old place, their home,--brought them together through a deep undercurrent of feeling. Their voices were low as they spoke of more intimate things than it is usual to speak of without constraint, something lowered between them as only a grief shared can lower bars to the spirit, their thinking set in that poignant sense of life which death alone seems able to create.