outlived the period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city
as he world once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except
the basements of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and
picked up copies of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he
read them, he sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away
with the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see,
with compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by
these means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently
proposed to go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.

He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they
should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the winter wore
away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute instructions for
getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the book-stalls by
conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife could see that he
had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find from one as from
the other.

She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and
that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl
herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope,
for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with a
kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in
one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to
the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he
lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six
weeks before he left his room.

He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and he
was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that when