For three days it went on like that: going ahead with the festivities, constantly thinking she would tell Edith as soon as they got home from this place or that, waiting until this or that person had gone, then dumb before the childish quality of Edith's excitement, deciding to wait until the next morning because Edith was either too happy or too tired to talk to her that night. That ingenuousness of her friend's pleasure in her wedding made Ruth feel, not only older, but removed from her by experience. Those days of her own frozen misery were days of tenderness for Edith, that tenderness which one well along the road of living feels for the one just setting feet upon the path. She was never able to understand how she did get through those days. It was an almost unbelievable thing that, knowing, she was able, up to the very last, to go right on with the old things, was able to talk to people as if nothing were different, to laugh, to dance. There were times when something seemed frozen in her heart and she could go on doing the usual things mechanically, just because she knew so well how to do them; then there were other times when every smallest thing was stabbed through and through with the consciousness that she would not be doing it again. And yet even then, she could go on, could appear the same. They were days of a terrible power for bearing pain. When the people of the town looked back to it, recalling everything they could about Ruth Holland in those days, some of them, remembering a tenderness in her manner with Edith, talked of what a hypocrite she was, while others satisfied themselves of her utter heartlessness in remembering her gaiety. It was two days before the wedding when she saw that she was not going to be able to tell Edith and got the idea of telling Edith's mother. Refusing to let herself consider what she would say when she began upon it, she went over there early that morning--Edith would not be up. Mrs. Lawrence was at breakfast alone. Ruth kept herself hard against the welcoming smile, but it seemed she was surely going to cry when, with a look of concern, Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed: "Why, Ruth dear, how pale you are!" She was telling Emma to bring Ruth a cup of coffee, talking of how absurd it was the way the girls were wearing themselves out, how, for that reason, she would be glad when it was all over. She spoke with anxiety of how nervous Edith had grown in the past week, how tired she was as a result of all the gaiety. "We'll have to be very careful of her, Ruth," she said. "Don't go to Edith with any worries, will you? Come to me. The slightest thing would upset Edith now." Ruth only nodded; she did not know what to say to that; certainly, after that, she did not know how to say the things she had come to tell. For what in the world could upset Edith so much as to have her maid-of-honor, her life-long friend, the girl she cared for most, refuse, two days before her wedding, to take her part in it?