The night before the day Gordon had fixed for their final parting Ruth slept but little. The task of gathering his things scattered about the house was harder than she had hoped. Over each little trinket that spoke its message of the tender intimacy of married life she had lingered and cried. She wished to keep everything. At last she placed the clothes in his trunk, his collars, cuffs, cravats and such odds and ends as he would need at once, and the rest she packed away carefully in bureau drawers and locked them up. His slippers and dressing-gowns she knew he would want, but she made up her mind she would keep them. The slippers were an old-fashioned pattern with quaint Spanish embroidery worked around the edges. She had made the first pair before they were married, with her girl's heart fluttering with new-found happiness. She had allowed him no other kind since their marriage. This bit of sentiment she had guarded even in the darkest days of the past year's estrangement. She had worked each pair with her own hand. His dressing-gowns, in which he often studied at home in her room late on Saturday nights, she had always made for him, changing their designs from time to time as her fancy had led her. Around these two articles of his wardrobe her very heart-strings seemed woven. She placed them in his trunk once, telling herself through her tears: "He may think of me when he sees them." Then the lightning flashed across the clouds in her eyes. "She might touch them! Let her make them for him after her own devil's fancy!" She took them out, kissed them and packed them away. His picture she took down carefully from the walls, his photographs from her mantel and bureau and dresser. The life-sized one she locked in a closet and packed the others with his belongings she meant to keep. On a wedding certificate, set in a quaint old gold frame, she looked long and tenderly. She took it down from its place over her bureau, where it had hung for years, and brushed the dust from the back. On its broad white margins he had written a poem to her on the birth of their first baby. He had sent her yards of rhymes during their courtship, but this was a poem. Every line was wet with his tears, and every thought throbbed with the sweetest music of his soul wrought to its highest tension of feeling. She read it over and over again and cried as though her heart would break as a thousand tender memories came stealing back from their early married life. "Oh, dear God!" she sobbed. "How could he have felt that--and he did feel it--and now desert me!" She sat for an hour with this framed emblem of her happiness and her sorrow in her hands, dreaming of their past.