"Come in, dear," she said gladly. "I was just thinking of you and wondering if such weather did not make you blue. Sit down here by the fire. It was sweet of you to come in the rain." She searched my distressed face anxiously as she spoke. I made no reply. My heart was too full at being comforted when I had come to comfort. As I sat on a low stool at her side she seemed to divine my mood, for she drew my head against her knee with a mother touch, and threaded my hair with a mother hand, and pressed down my eyelids as I have seen her do when she puts her baby to sleep. And though she must have felt the tears come, she did not appear to know. "Dear Ruth," she said, "I have been sitting here thinking about you, and wondering if you were satisfied, such a loving heart as you have, to face the rest of your life without the love you deserve. You won't be vexed with me for speaking of it to you, for you know I am so old-fashioned that I think love is the only thing in this world worth having. It is all that I live for. Of course my children love me, but, until they grow older, theirs is only an instinctive love. It isn't like the love of a husband, which singles you out of all the other countless women in the world to be his and only his forever. There is power enough in that thought to nerve the weakest woman to do a giant's task. The mere fact that you are all in all, the _only_ woman, to the man you so dearly love, the one person who can make his world; when you think that your being away from one meal or out of the house when he comes in will make him miss you till his heart aches--this will keep down a moan of pain when it is almost beyond bearing, for fear it might cause him to suffer with you; it will nerve you to stand up and smile into his eyes when you are ready to drop with exhaustion. Love, such as a husband's love for his wife, is the most precious, the most supporting thing a woman can have. You never hear me talk much about my husband, but he is all this and more to me. I cannot begin to tell you about it. I read about unhappy marriages--why, I read a dreadful thing to-night in the paper, which set me to thinking how safe and happy I am, and how thankful I ought to be that I can trust my husband so. It was about a man who was unfaithful to his wife, and they had five children just as we have. I know such things do occur, but how or why is a mystery to me. I hope I am not too hard when I say that in such a case it must be the wife's fault. Surely if she had been a good wife, an unselfish and loving wife, he could not have been enticed away. Poor thing! I wonder how she felt when she heard it. Probably she wouldn't believe it. Probably she had too much faith in him. You shake your head. Why, Ruth, you dear thing, you don't know anything about it. A wife _couldn't_ believe such a thing. Why, I wouldn't believe it if told by an angel from heaven. But then my husband is so dear to me. I do sometimes