"I suppose not," he said. "No, I suppose not." He stood there considering that. "But I guess," he went on diffidently, "I don't just know myself—but it seems there come times when being fair gets sort of—lost sight of."
The tears were running down her face and she was not trying to check them.
He stood there another minute and then timidly held out his hand. "Good-by, Mrs. Williams," he said gently.
She took his hand with a queer, choking little laugh and held it very tight for a minute, as if to steady herself.
His own eyes had dimmed. Then he smiled—a smile that seemed to want to go ahead and take any offence or hurt from what he was about to say. "Maybe, Mrs. Williams, that you will come to feel like being fairer to Ruth than Ruth was to you." His smile widened and he looked very boyish as he finished, "And that would be one way of getting back, you know!"
CHAPTER THIRTY
Freeport had a revival of interest in Mrs. Stuart Williams that fall. They talked so much of her in the first years that discussion had pretty well spent itself, and latterly it had only been rarely—to a stranger, or when something came up to bring it to them freshly—that they did more than occasionally repeat the expressions which that first feeling had created. There was no new thing to say of their feeling about her. No one had become intimate with her in those years, and that itself somehow kept the picture. She was unique, and fascinated them in the way she was one of them and yet apart. The mystery enveloping her made it mean more than it could have meant through disclosures from her. It kept it more poignant to speculate about a concealed suffering than it could have continued to be through discussing confidences. But even speculation as to what was beneath that unperturbed surface had rather talked itself out, certainly had lost its keen edge of interest with the passing of the years.
That fall, however, they began to speak of a change in her. They said first that she did not look well; then they began to talk about her manner being different. She had always kept so calm, and now there were times when she appeared nervous. She had had throughout a certain cold serenity. Now she was sometimes irritable, disclosing a fretfulness close under the untroubled surface. She looked older, they said; her brows knit and there were lines about mouth and eyes. She seemed less sure of herself. It made interest in her a fresh thing. They wondered if she were not at last breaking, spoke with a careful show of regret, concern, but whetted anticipations gave eagerness to voices of sympathy. They wondered if Ruth Holland's having come home in the Spring, the feeling of her being in the town, could have been too much of a strain, preying upon the deserted wife and causing her later to break. There were greedy wonderings as to whether she could possibly have seen Ruth Holland, whether anything had happened that they did not know about.
Late one December afternoon Mrs. Williams came home from a church bazaar and curtly telephoned that she would not be back for the evening. She spoke of a headache. And her head did ache. It ached, she bitterly reflected, from being looked at, from knowing they were taking observations for subsequent speculation. She had been in charge of a table at the bazaar; a number of little things had gone wrong and she got out of patience with one of her assistants. Other people got irritated upon occasions of that sort—and that was all there was to it. But she was not at liberty to show annoyance. She knew at the time that they were whispering around about it, connecting it with the thing about her that it seemed never really went out of their minds. The sense of that had made her really angry and she had said sharp things she knew she would be sorry for because they would just be turned over as part of the thing that was everlastingly being turned over. She was not free; they were always watching her; even after all these years always thinking that everything had something to do with that.