She thought of that spiritual hinterland Deane talked about. She thought of her and Stuart. She grew very sad in the thinking. She wondered if it was her fault. However it was, it was true they no longer found the live things in one another. She had not been able to communicate to him the feeling with which she came back from Annie's. It was a lesser thing for trying to talk of it to him. She did not reach him; she knew that he only thought her a little absurd. After that she did not try to talk to him of what she felt. Life lessened; things were as they were; they too were as they were. It came to seem just a matter of following out what had been begun. And then that news of the divorce had come to mock her. But she must do something for Deane. Deane must not go like that. She had brought pencil and writing tablet with her, thinking that perhaps out of doors, away from the house where she had seemed locked in all winter, she could write to him. She thought of things to say, things that should be said, but she did not seem to have any power to charge them with life. How could the dead rouse the dead? She sat there thinking of her and Deane, of how they had always been able to reach one another. And finally she began: "Dear Deane, "You must find your way back to life." She did not go on. She sat staring at what she had written. She read it over; she said it aloud. It surged in upon her, into shut places. She sat looking at it, frightened at what it was doing. Sat looking at it after it was all blurred by tears--looking down at the words she herself had written--"You must find your way back to life." CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Ruth was very quiet through the next week. Stuart was preoccupied with the plans he was making for going to Montana; when he talked with her it was of that, of arrangements to be made for it, and his own absorption apparently kept him from taking note of her being more quiet than usual, or different. It was all working out very well. He had found a renter for the ranch, the prospects for the venture in Montana were good. They were to move within a month. And one night in late April when he came home from town he handed Ruth a long envelope, with a laughing, "Better late than never." Then he was soon deep in some papers. Ruth was sorting a box of things; there were many things to be gone through preparatory to moving. She had put the paper announcing his divorce aside without comment; but she loitered over what she was doing. She was watching Stuart, thinking about him.