After a moment she rose, a little stiffly—she had aged since Edgar’s death—walked over to Ruth, and lightly stroked the sleek brown head. “I’ve a very great—_respect_ for Amos,” she said. Then, her eyes filling, she went out of the room; so she did not see Ruth’s head drop lower. Respect? But Ruth herself respected him. No one, no one so much! But that was all. He was the best, the bravest man in the world; but that was all. While poor, weak, faulty Ned—how she had loved him! Why couldn’t she love a right man? Why did not admiration and respect and gratitude combined give her one throb of that lovely feeling that Ned’s eyes used to give her before she knew that they were false? Yet it was not Ned’s spectral hand that chilled her and held her back. Three years had passed since he died, and before he died she had so completely ceased to love him that she could pity him as well as his mother. The scorching anger was gone with the love. But somehow, in the immeasurable humiliation and anguish of that passage, it was as if her whole soul were burned over, and the very power of loving shrivelled up and spoiled. How else could she keep from loving Amos, who had done everything (she told herself bitterly) that Ned had missed doing? And she gravely feared that Amos had grown to care for her. A hundred trifles betrayed his secret to her who had known the glamour that imparadises the earth, and never would know it any more. Mrs. Smith had seen it also. Ruth remembered the day, nearly a year ago, that she had looked up (she was singing at their cabinet organ, singing hymns of a Sunday evening) and had caught the look, not on Amos’s face, but on the kind old face that was like her mother’s. She understood why, the next day, Mrs. Smith moved poor Ned’s picture from the parlor to her own chamber, where there were four photographs of him already. “And now she is reconciled to what will never happen,” thought Ruth, “and is afraid it won’t happen. Poor Mother Smith, it never will!” She wished, half irritably, that Amos would let a comfortable situation alone. Of late, during the month or six weeks past, he had appeared beset by some hidden trouble. When he did not reckon that he was observed his countenance would wear an expression of harsh melancholy; and more than once had she caught his eyes tramping through space after her with a look that made her recall the lines of Tennyson Ned used to quote to her in jest—for she had never played with him: “Right through’ his manful breast darted the pang That makes a man, in the sweet face of her That he loves most, lonely and miserable.”