"Don't tell me I don't remember," she flashed back happy and excited beyond measure at playing this new remembering game. "That was our special call, yours and Rod's and mine. Oh Rod!" And at that all the joy went out of the eager, flushed face. She went back into her cousin's arms again, sobbing in heart breaking fashion. The turning tide of memory had brought back wreckage of grief as well as joy. In Geoffrey Annersley's arms Ruth mourned her brother's loss for the first time. Larry sent his uncle a quick look and went out of the room. The older doctor followed. Ruth and her cousin were left alone to pick up the dropped threads of the past.
They all met again at luncheon however, Ruth rosy cheeked, excited and red-eyed but on the whole none the worse for her journey back into the land of forgotten things. As Larry had hoped the external stimulus of actually seeing and hearing somebody out of that other life was enough to start the train. What she did not yet remember Geoffrey supplied and little by little the past took on shape and substance and Elinor Ruth Farringdon became once more a normal human being with a past as well as a present which was dazzlingly delightful, save for the one dark blur of her dear Rod's unknown fate.
In the course of the conversation at table Geoffrey addressed his cousin as Elinor and was promptly informed that she wasn't Elinor and was Ruth and that he was to call her by that name or run the risk of being disapproved of very heartily.
He laughed, amused at this.
"Now I know you are real," he said. "It is exactly the tone you used when you issued the contrary command and by Jove almost the same words except for the reversed titles. 'Don't call me Ruth, Geoff,'" he mimicked. "'I am not going to be Ruth any more. I am going to be Elinor. It is a much prettier name.'"
"Well, I don't think so now," retorted Ruth. "I've changed my mind again. I think Ruth is the nicest name there is because—well—" She blushed adorably and looked across the table at the young doctor, "because Larry likes it," she completed half defiantly.
"Is that meant to be an official publishing of the bans?" teased her cousin when the laugh that Ruth's naïve confession had raised subsided leaving Larry as well as Ruth a little hot of cheek.
"If you want to call it that," said Ruth. "Larry, I think you might say something, not leave me everything to do myself. Tell them we are engaged and are going to be married—"
"To-morrow," put in Larry suddenly pushing back his chair and going over to stand behind Ruth, a hand on either shoulder, facing the others gallantly if obviously also embarrassedly over her shyly bent blonde head.
The blonde head went up at that, and was shaken very decidedly.