garment of duplicity was gossamer, he felt, after all, in such
atmosphere of loyalty and trust as surrounded him at Rosedale.

He knew that in the daily attrition and conventional intimacies of the
table, the drawing-room, or the promenade, the cloak covering his
resentful antipathy, his moral perversities, his thinly veiled
impatience, was worn to such thin shreds that eyes keen as Jack's must
see and know him as he was. What was hatefulest and most unendurable of
all was the bondage of truce in which the Atterburys held him. Wesley
was no coward, and he ached to meet Jack face to face, arm to arm, and
settle with that thoughtless insubordinate a rankling list of griefs
heaped up in moments of over-vivacious frankness. He would make Jack
smart for his arrogance, his insolence, his cursed condescension so soon
as they were back among the Caribees.

But meanwhile, here, daily tortured by harmless things--tortured by his
soul's imaginings--Wesley was becoming a burden to Kate, who saw too
plainly that he was in misery, and realized that it was largely through
his own inherent weakness and insincerity. He had all the coarse fiber
of his father without the same force in its texture. With merely
superficial good manners, he was never certain whether the punctilious
niceties observed toward him by the Spragues and Atterburys were not a
species of studied satire. Vincent, who had never shown him the
slightest consideration in Acredale, treated him here with the
chivalrous decorum that the code of the South demanded in those days to
a guest. Wesley ground his teeth under the burden, not quite sure
whether it was mockery or malevolence. He watched with malignant
attentiveness the imperceptible change of tone and manner that marked
the family's treatment of the Spragues. There was none of the grave
ceremoniousness he resented in the Atterburys' behavior with them.