Larry shook his head.

“Don’t worry, please.  We’ll keep on advertising.  He is bound to come before long if he really is your husband.  Some day he will be coming up our hill and run away with you, worse luck!”

Ruth’s eyes were on the ring again.

“It is funny,” she said.  “But I can’t make myself feel married.  I can’t make the ring mean anything to me.  I don’t want it to mean anything.  I don’t want to be married.  Sometimes I dream that Geoffrey Annersley has come and I put my hand over my eyes because I don’t want to see him.  Isn’t that dreadful?” she turned to Larry to ask.

“You can’t help it.”  Larry tried manfully to push back his own wholly unreasonable satisfaction in her aversion to her presumptive husband.  “It is the blow and the shock of the whole thing.  It will be all right in time.  You will fall on your Geoffrey’s neck and call him blessed when the time comes.”

“I don’t believe he is coming,” she announced suddenly with conviction.

Larry got up and walked over to her couch.

“What makes you say that?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.  It was just a feeling I had.  Something inside me said right out loud:  ‘He isn’t coming.  He isn’t your husband.’  Maybe it is because I don’t want him to come and don’t want him to be my husband.  Oh, dear!  It is all so queer and mixed up and horrid.  It is awful not to be anybody—­just a ghost.  I wish I’d been killed.  Why didn’t you leave me?  Why did you dig me out?  All the others said I was dead.  Why didn’t you let me be dead?  It would have been better.”

She turned her face away and buried it in the pillow, sobbing softly, suddenly like a child.

This was too much for Larry.  He dropped on his knees beside her and put his arms around the quivering little figure.

“Don’t, Ruth,” he implored.  “Don’t cry and don’t—­don’t wish you were dead.  I—­I can’t stand it.”

There was a tap at the door.  Larry got to his feet in guilty haste and went to the door of the stateroom.

“It is time for Mrs. Annersley’s medicine,” announced the nurse impersonally, entering and going over to the wash stand for a glass.

The white linen back safely turned, Larry gave one swift look at Ruth and bolted, shutting the door behind him.  The nurse turned to look at the patient whose face was still hidden in the pillow and then her gaze traveled meditatively toward the door out of which the young doctor had shot so precipitately.  Larry had forgotten that there was a mirror over the wash stand and that nurses, however impersonal, are still women with eyes in their heads.

“H—­m,” reflected the onlooker.  “I wouldn’t have thought he was that kind.  You never can tell about men, especially doctors.  I wish him joy falling in love with a woman who doesn’t know whether or not she has a husband.  Your tablets, Mrs. Annersley,” she added aloud.