But she was hurrying on; none of those worries, fears, had power to lay any real hold on the thing that possessed her; faster and faster she hurried; she had turned into the little street, had passed the last house, turned the bend in the road, and yes! there was Stuart, waiting for her, coming to her. Everything else fell away. Nothing else in the world mattered. CHAPTER TEN Ten o'clock found Ruth sitting on the porch at home with her mother and father, her brother Cyrus and Deane. Her father was talking with Deane about the operation that had been performed on the book-keeper in Mr. Holland's bank; Cyrus talked of somebody's new touring car, the number of new machines there were in town that year; her mother wondered where some of the people who had them got the money for them. The talk moved placidly from one thing to another, Mr. Holland saying at intervals that he must be going to bed, his wife slapping at the mosquitoes and talking about going inside--both delaying, comfortably stupid. Ruth was sitting on the top step leaning back against the porch pillar. She said little, she was very tired now. Something in this dragging talk soothed her. It seemed safe just because it was so commonplace; it was relaxing. She was glad to be back to it--to the world of it; in returning safely to it she felt a curiously tender feeling for it, a perhaps absurd sense of having come through something for it. She could rest in it while within herself she continued to live back in that hour with Stuart, that hour which struggle and fear and the passionate determination to have in spite of everything had made terribly intense. They had closed themselves in with that little while of love, holding it apart from everything else, and yet every minute of it was charged with the consciousness of what was all around them. They had clung to that hour with a desperate passion, the joy of the moment that was there always stabbed with pain for a moment passing. At the last they had clung to each other as if time too--time, over which they had no control--was going to beat them apart. So much had been hard that in returning she had a warm feeling of gratitude to all of them for not making it harder for her, not questioning, exposing her; relief was so great that they were all newly dear for thus letting her alone. She had managed all right with Deane, the clumsy arrangement she had been forced into appeared to have just that haphazardness which characterizes most of the arrangements of life. Her mother had merely asked what the Lawrence's had for dinner; her father joked about the way she had trained the roses in the back yard. Strangely enough instead of feeling she had outraged them, been unworthy this easy, affectionate intercourse, she had a sense, now that she had again come through a precarious thing safely, of having saved them from something they knew not of, a strange lifted-up feeling of bearing something for them.