And then they fell silent, thinking of years gone--years when the house had not been all run down, when there was good reason for keeping it. To let the house go to strangers seemed the final acknowledgment that all those old things had passed away. It was a more intimate, a sympathetic silence into which that feeling flowed--each thinking of old days in that house, each knowing that the other was thinking of those days. Harriett could see Ruth as a little girl running through those rooms. She remembered a certain little blue gingham dress--and Ruth's hair braided down her back; pictures of Ruth with their grandfather, their mother, their father--all those three gone now. She started to tell Ruth what she had come to tell her, then changed it to something else, still holding back, afraid of emotion, of breaking through, seeming powerless and hating herself for being powerless. She would tell that a little later--before she left. She would wait until Ted came in. She seized upon that, it let her out--let her out from the thing she had been all warm eagerness to do. To bridge that time she asked a few diffident questions about the West; she really wanted very much to know how Ruth lived, how she "managed." But she put the questions carefully, it would seem reluctantly, just because almost everything seemed to lead to that one thing,--the big thing that lay there between her and Ruth. It was hard to ask questions about the house Ruth lived in and not let her mind get swamped by that one terrible fact that she lived there with Stuart Williams--another woman's husband. Harriett's manner made Ruth bitter. It seemed Harriett was afraid to talk to her, evidently afraid that at any moment she would come upon something she did not want to come near. Harriett needn't be so afraid!--she wasn't going to contaminate her. And so the talk became a pretty miserable affair. It was a relief when Flora Copeland came in the room. "There's someone here to see you, Ruth," she said. "Deane?" inquired Ruth. "No, a woman." "A woman?"--and then, at the note of astonishment in her own voice she laughed in an embarrassed little way. "Yes, a Mrs. Herman. She says you may remember her as Annie Morris. She says she went to school with you." "Yes," said Ruth, "I know." She was looking down, pulling at her handkerchief. After an instant she looked up and said quietly: "Won't you ask her to come in here?" The woman who stood in the doorway a moment later gave the impression of life, work, having squeezed her too hard. She had quick movements, as if she were used to doing things in a hurry. She had on a cheap, plain suit, evidently bought several years before. She was very thin, her face almost pinched, but two very live eyes looked out from it. She appeared embarrassed, but somehow the embarrassment seemed only a surface thing. She held out a red, rough hand to Ruth and smiled in a quick, bright way as she said: "I don't know that you remember me, Ruth."