Ruth flushed slightly at the mention of the feeling between her brothers; but still she did not speak, scarcely moved.
Harriett was silent a moment. "That's one of the reasons," she took it up, "why I am anxious to do something to bring us together. I don't want Ted to be feeling this way toward Cyrus. And Edgar, too, he seems to be very bitter against. It makes him defiant. It isn't good for him. I think Ted has a little disposition to be wild," she said in a confidential tone.
Ruth spoke then. "I hadn't noticed any such disposition," she said simply.
"Well, he doesn't go to church. It seems to me he doesn't—accept things as he ought to."
Ruth said nothing to that, only continued to look at her sister, waiting.
"So I talked to them," Harriett went on. "Of course, Ruth, there's no use pretending it was easy. You know how Cyrus feels; he isn't one to change much, you know." She turned away and her hand fumbled in a little patch of clover.
"But we do want to do something, Ruth," she came back to it. "We all feel it's terrible this way. So this is what Edgar proposed, and Cyrus agreed to it, and it seems to me the best thing to do." She stopped again, then said, in a blurred sort of voice, fumbling with the clover and not looking at Ruth: "If you will leave the—your—if you will leave the man you are—living with, promising never to see him again,—if you will give that up and come home we will do everything we can to stand by you, go on as best we can as if nothing had happened. We will try to—"
She looked up—and did not go on, but flushed uncomfortably at sight of Ruth's face—eyes wide with incredulity, with something like horror.
"You don't mean that, do you, Harriett?" Ruth asked in a queer, quiet voice.
"But we wanted to do something—" Harriett began, and then again halted, halted before the sudden blaze of anger in Ruth's eyes.