at every instant. Even mother has noticed it, and she imagines
that you are in love."

"In love!" he threw back his head with a loud laugh. "Oh, I'm
tired, Cynthia--dog-tired, that's the matter."

"I know, I know," replied Cynthia, rubbing her eyes hard with the
back of her hand. "And the worst is that there's no help for
it--absolutely none. I think about it sometimes until I wonder
that I don't go mad."

He turned at this from the window through which he had been
gazing and fixed upon her a perplexed and moody stare. The
wistful patience in her face, like the look he had seen in the
eyes of overworked farm animals, aroused in him a desire to prod
her into actual revolt--into any decisive rebellion against fate.
To accept life upon its own terms seemed to him, at the instant,
pure cowardliness--the enforced submission of a weakened will;
and he questioned almost angrily if the hereditary instincts were
alive in her also? Did she, too, have her secret battles and her
silent capitulations? Or was her pious resignation, after all,
only a new form of the old Blake malady--of that fatal apathy
which seized them, like disease, when events demanded strenuous
endeavour? Could the saintly fortitude he had once so envied be,
when all was said, merely the outward expression of the inertia
he himself had felt--of the impulse to drift with the tide, let
it carry one where it would?

"Well, I'm glad it's no worse," said Cynthia, with a sigh of
relief, as she turned toward the door. "Since you are not sick,