She laid her hand on his arm, left it there while she was speaking. "Ted," she said, "it's like this. This has gone for me. It's all gone. It was wonderful--but it's gone. Some people, I know, could go on with the life love had made after love was gone. I am not one of those people--that's all. You speak of there being something discreditable in my going away just when I could marry. To me there would be something discreditable in going on. It would be--" she put her hand over her heart and said it very simply, "it would be unfaithful to something here." She choked a little and he turned away. "But I don't see how you can bear, Ruth," he said after a moment, made gentle by her confidence, "to feel that it has--failed. I don't see how you can bear--after all you paid for it--to let it come to nothing." "Don't say that, Ted!" she cried in a voice that told he had touched the sorest place. "Don't say that!" she repeated, a little wildly. "You don't know what you're talking about. _Failed?_ A thing that glorified life for years--_failed_?" Her voice broke, but it was more steadily she went on: "That's the very reason I'm going to New York--simply that it may _not_ come to nothing. I'm going away from it for that very reason--that it may not come to nothing! That my life may not come to nothing. What I've had--what I've gone through--lives in me, Ted. It doesn't come to nothing if I--come to something!" She stopped abruptly with a choking little laugh. Ted looked at her wonderingly; but the hardness had gone out of his look. "But what are you going to do, Ruth?" he asked gently. "I don't know yet. I've got to find out." "You must see that I can't help but worry about it," he went on. "Going so far away--to a place absolutely unknown to you--where I'm afraid it will be so much harder than you think." She did not answer him, looking off to that eastern range she was going to cross, as if the mountains could help her to hold on to her own feeling against the doubts he was trying to throw around her. "You see, Ruth," he went on, as if feeling his way, not wanting to hurt her, "what has been may make it hard to go on. You can't tell. You'll never know--never be sure. Old things may come up to spoil new ones for you. That's what I'm so afraid of. That's what it seems you aren't seeing. You would be so much--safer--to stay with Stuart." She turned to him with a little laugh, her lashes wet. "Yes, Ted dear, I suppose I would. But I never did seem to stay where I was safest--did I?"