His momentary wonder at her reticence passed. Again he was leaning a little forward, looking up the broad thoroughfare with its double row of lights, its interminable rows of houses growing in importance as they rushed on. "It is we ourselves who pass now along the lighted way!" he exclaimed, holding her arm for, a moment. "It is an enchanted journey, ours, Ruth." She laughed bitterly. "An enchanted journey which leads to two very dreary attic rooms on the sixth floor of a poverty-stricken house," she reminded him. "It leads back to the smoke-stained city, to the four walls within which one dreams empty dreams." "It isn't so bad as that," he protested. Her lips trembled for a moment; she half closed her eyes. An impulse of pain passed like a spasm across her tired features. "It is different for you," she murmured. "Every day you escape. For me there is no escape." He felt a momentary twinge of selfishness. Yet, after all, the great truths were incontrovertible. He could lighten her lot but little. There was very little of himself that he could give her--of his youth, his strength, his vigorous hold upon life. Through all the tangle of his expanding interests in existence, the medley of strange happenings in which he found himself involved, one thing alone was clear. He was passing on into a life making larger demands upon, him, a life in which their companionship must naturally become a slighter thing. Nevertheless, he spoke to her reassuringly. "You cannot believe, Ruth," he said, "that I shall ever forget? We have been through too much together, too many dark days." She sighed. "There wasn't much for either of us to look forward to, was there, when we first looked down on the river together and you began to tell me fairy stories." "They kept our courage alive," he declared. "I am not sure that they are not coming true." She half closed her eyes. "For you, Arnold," she murmured. "Not all the fancies that were ever spun in the brain of any living person could alter life very much for me." He took her hand and held it tightly. Yet it was hard to know what to say to her. It was the inevitable tragedy, this, of their sexes and her infirmity. He realized in those few minutes something of how she was feeling,--the one who is left upon the lonely island while the other is borne homeward into the sunshine and tumult of life. There was little, indeed, which he could say. It was not the hour, this, for protestation.