his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for him he
submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. Her heart smote her for her guilty
joy in his sentence, and she punished herself by asking if it would not
do him more good to get back to the comfort and quiet of their own house.
She went to the length of saying that she believed his attack had been
brought on more by homesickness than anything else. But the doctor
agreed rather with her wish than her word, and held out that his
melancholy was not the cause but the effect of his disorder. Then she
took courage and began getting ready to go. She did not flag even in the
dark hours when Kenton got back his courage with his returning strength,
and scoffed at the notion of Europe, and insisted that as soon as they
were in Tuskingum he should be all right again.

She felt the ingratitude, not to say the perfidy, of his behavior, and
she fortified herself indignantly against it; but it was not her constant
purpose, or the doctor's inflexible opinion, that prevailed with Kenton
at last a letter came one day for Ellen which she showed to her mother,
and which her mother, with her distress obscurely relieved by a sense of
its powerful instrumentality, brought to the girl's father. It was from
that fellow, as they always called him, and it asked of the girl a
hearing upon a certain point in which, it had just come to his knowledge,
she had misjudged him. He made no claim upon her, and only urged his
wish to right himself with her because she was the one person in the
whole world, after his mother, for whose good opinion he cared. With
some tawdriness of sentiment, the letter was well worded; it was
professedly written for the sole purpose of knowing whether, when she
came back to Tuskingum, she would see him, and let him prove to her that
he was not wholly unworthy of the kindness she had shown him when he was
without other friends.