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.

She was a girl again in old Hampton, Virginia, her heart all a-quiver over a ball at the Hygeia, where she was to meet a guest, a distinguished young preacher resting for the summer just from his divinity course. He had seen her in the crowd at the hotel and begged a friend to introduce him. She was going to meet him in the parlours, dressed in the splendour of her ballroom dress that night, and conquer this handsome young giant. And from the moment they met, she was the conquered, and he the conqueror.

The incense of their honeymoon in a village of southern Indiana during his first pastorate, when the wonder of love made storm days bright with splendour and clothed in beauty the meanest clod of earth, stole over her soul—each memory added to her pain, and yet they were sweet. She hugged them to her heart.

“They are all mine at least!” she sighed. “And I am glad I have lived them.”

At two o’clock she went into the nursery and looked at the sleeping children. She bent over the cradle of the boy. He was dreaming, and a smile was playing about the corners of his lips.

He was so like Gordon, with his little mouth twitching in dreamy laughter, she fell on her knees, and buried her face in her delicate tapering hands, crying:

“How can I bear it!”

She placed her arms on the rail of the cradle and gazed at him tenderly.

“Lord, keep him clean and pure, and whatever he may do in life, may he never break a woman’s heart!” she softly prayed.

Into her first-born’s face she looked long and in silence. How like her, and how like him, and how marvelous the miracle of this union of flesh and blood and spirit in a living soul! Lucy was growing more like her every day. She could see and hear herself in her ways and voice, until she would laugh aloud sometimes at the memory of her own childhood. And yet to see her very self growing into the startling image of her lover who was deserting her cut anew with stinging power.

Again she was softly praying: “Dear Lord, whatever shall come to her, poverty or riches, joy or pain, honour or shame, sunshine or shadow, save her from this. My feet will climb this Calvary, and my lips drink its gall, but may the cup pass from her!”

After a few hours of fitful sleep, she rose and looked out her window on another radiant November morning. So clear was the sky she could see the flag-staffs of the great downtown buildings and back of them in the distant bay the pennant masts of ships at anchor. The trees in Central Park seemed to glow with the splendour of the dying autumn’s sun. The glory of the day mocked her sorrow.

“What does Nature care?” she sighed. “And yet who knows, it may be a token! I must bravely play my part and leave the rest with God.”

Watching at the window she saw Gordon coming, his broad feet measuring a giant’s stride, his wide shoulders and magnificent head high with unconscious strength.

She wondered if he would stop in the parlour as a visitor or come to her room as was his custom, and a sharp pain cut her with the thought of their changed relationship.

He stopped in the hall, asked the maid to send the children down at once, and stepped into the parlour.

He felt a strange embarrassment in his own home. This house he had bought for Ruth soon after their arrival in New York. It had just been built in the wide-open space of the cliffs on Washington Heights. The Pilgrim Church’s members were long since scattered over every quarter of the city, and, by arranging his study in the church, he was able to have his home so far removed from the noise of the downtown district. He had thus fulfilled Ruth’s passionate desire for a home of her own within their moderate means. He recalled now with tender melancholy how happy they had been decorating this little nest, and how far from his wildest dream had been such an ending of it all.

But he had come with important news, and he hoped her pain would be softened by its announcement.

The children entered with shouts of delight. First one would hug him, and then the other, and then both would try at the same time.

Lucy put her hands on his smooth ruddy cheeks and kissed his lips and eyes with the quaintest imitation of her mother’s trick of gesture.

“Where have you been, Papa? We thought you were never coming? Mama said you were gone for a trip and would come to-day, but”—her voice sank—“she’s ............