“You can’t trust a man in love, especially a young idiot who waited a full quarter century to get the disease for the first time.  But you are right.  I’d trust him anywhere, more rather than less because of that confession of his.  I’ve wondered that he didn’t break his promise long before this.  He is only human and his restraint has been pretty nearly super-human.  I don’t believe he would have smashed up now as he calls it if his nerves hadn’t been strained about to the limit by taking all the responsibility for Granny at the end.  It was terrible for the poor lad.”

“It was terrible for you too, Phil.  Larry isn’t the only one who has suffered.  I do wish those foolish youngsters could have waited a little and not thrown a new anxiety on you just now.  But I suppose we can’t blame them under the circumstances.  Isn’t it strange, dear?  Except for the children sleeping up in the nursery you and I are absolutely alone for the first time since I came to the House on the Hill.”

He nodded a little sadly.  His father was gone long since and now Granny too.  And Ned’s children were all grown up, would perhaps none of them ever come again in the old way.  Their wings were strong enough now to make strange flights.

“We’ve filled your life rather full, Margery mine,” he said.  “I hope there are easier days ahead.”

“I don’t want any happier ones,” said Margery as she slipped her hand into his.

The next few days were a perfect nightmare to Larry.  Naturally he found no trace of Ruth, did not know indeed under what name she had chosen to go.  The city had swallowed her up and the saddest part of it was she had wanted to be swallowed, to get away from himself.  She had gone for his sake he knew, because he had told her he could endure things no longer.  She had taken him at his word and vanished utterly.  For all her gentleness and docility Ruth had tremendous fortitude.  She had taken this hard, rash step alone in the dark for love’s sake, just as she was ready that unforgettable night to take that rasher step with him to marriage or something less than marriage had he permitted it.  She would have preferred to marry him, not to bother with abstractions of right and wrong, to take happiness as it offered but since he would not have it so she had lost herself.

Despair, remorse, anxiety, loneliness held him-in thrall while he roamed the streets of the old city, almost hopeless now of finding her but still doggedly persistent in his search.  Another man under such a strain of mind and body would have gone on a stupendous thought drowning carouse.  Larry Holiday had no such refuge in his misery.  He took it straight without recourse to anaesthetic of any sort.  And on the fourth day when he had been about to give up in defeat and go home to the Hill to wait for word of Ruth a crack of light dawned.

Chancing to be strolling absent mindedly across the Gardens he ran into a college classmate of his, one Gary Eldridge, who shook his hand with crushing grip and announced that it was a funny thing Larry’s bobbing up like that because he had been hearing the latter’s name pretty consecutively all the previous afternoon on the lips of the daintiest little blonde beauty it had been his luck to behold in many a moon, a regular Greuze girl in fact, eyes and all.