At first the very novelty of the situation had fed his eyes with rapture and fired the girl's face with a feverish excitement almost as pink as happiness. The surprise and congratulations of their friends, the speech of the janitor, the floral offering of the elevator boy, the long procession of silver spoons and cut-glass dishes, had filled their days with interest and laughter. Trig in her light muslin house gowns or her big gingham aprons, Ruth fluttered blissfully around her house like a new, brainy sort of butterfly. By some fine, instinctive delicacy, shrewder than many women's love, she divined and forestalled Drew's domestic tastes and preferences, and lined his simplest, homespun needs with all the quiver and sheen of silk. Resting his weariness, spurring his laziness; equally quick to divine the need of a sofa pillow or a joke; equally interested in his food and his politics; always ready to talk, always ready to keep still; cramping her free suburban ways into his hampered accommodations; missing her garden and her pets and her piazzas without ever acknowledging it—she tried in every plausible way except loving to compensate Drew for the wrong she had done him.
Only once did Drew's smoldering self-control slip the short leash he had set for himself. Just once, round the glowing coziness of a rainy-night open fire, he had dropped his book slammingly on the floor and reached out his hand to her soft hair that brightened like bronze in the lamplight. "Are you happy?" he had probed before he could fairly bite the words back; and she had jumped up, and tossed her hair out of her eyes, and laughed as she started for the kitchen. "No, I'm not exactly happy," she had said. "But I'm awfully—interested."
So June budded into July, and July bloomed into August, and August wilted into September, and September brittled and crisped and flamed at last into October. Tennis and boating and picnics and horseback riding filled up the edges of the days. Little by little the bright, wholesome red came back to live in Ruth's rounding cheeks. Little by little the good steady gleam of normal interests supplanted the wild will-o'-the-wisp lights in her eyes. Little by little her accumulating possessions began to steel shyly out from her tiny room and make themselves boldly at home in the places where hitherto they had ventured only as guests. Her workbasket crowded Drew's tobacco-jar deliberately from the table to the top of the bookcase. Her daring hands nonchalantly replaced a brutally clever cartoon with a soft-toned sketch of a little child. Once, indeed, an ostentatiously freshly laundered dress, all lace and posies and ruffles, went and hung itself brazenly in Drew's roomy closet right next to his fishing clothes.
And then, just as Drew thought that at last he saw Happiness stop and turn and look at him a bit whimsically, Aleck Reese came back to town—Aleck Reese, not as Fate should have had him, drunken with flattery, riotous with revelry, chasing madly some new infatuation, but Aleck Reese sobered, dazed, temporarily purified by the shock of his loss, if not by the loss itself.
For a week, blissfully unconscious of any cause, Drew had watched with growing perplexity and anxiety the sudden, abrupt flag in the girl's health and spirits and general friendliness. Flowers, fruit, candy, books, excursion plans had all successively, one by one, failed to rouse either her interest or her ordinary civility. And then one night, dragging home extra late from a worried, wearisome day at the office, faint for his dinner, sick for his sleep, he found the apartment perfectly dark and cheerless, the fire unlighted, the table unset, and Ruth herself lying in a paroxysm of grief on the floor under his stumbling feet. With his dizzy head reeling blindly, and his hands shaking like an aspen, he picked her up and tried to carry her to the couch; but she wrenched herself away from him, and walked over to the window and halfway back again before she spoke.
"Aleck Reese has come home," she announced dully, and reached up unthinkingly and turned a blast of electric light full on her ghastly face.
Drew clutched at the back of the nearest chair. "Have you seen him?" he almost whispered.
The girl nodded. "Yes. He's been here a week. I've seen him twice. Once—all day at the tennis club—and this afternoon I met him on the street, and he came home with me to get—a book."
"Why didn't you tell me before that he was here?"
She shrugged her shoulders wearily. "I thought his coming wasn't going to matter," she faltered, "but—"