"Mrs. Hilary and Louise are taking me over
to Rome for the winter."

"You don't say so, you don't say!" said Corey, "I wish my family would
take me. Boston is gradually making an old man of me. I'm afraid it will
end by killing me."

X.

Northwick, after the Pinneys went home, lapsed into a solitude relieved
only by the daily letters that Suzette sent him. He shrank from the
offers of friendly kindness on the part of people at the hotel, who
pitied his loneliness; and he began to live in a dream of his home
again. He had relinquished that notion of attempting a new business
life, which had briefly revived in his mind; the same causes that had
operated against it in the beginning, controlled and defeated it now. He
felt himself too old to begin life over; his energies were spent. Such
as he had been, he had made himself very slowly and cautiously, in
familiar conditions; he had never been a man of business dash, and he
could not pick himself up and launch himself in a new career, as a man
of different make might have done, even at his age. Perhaps there had
been some lesion of the will in that fever of his at Haha Bay, which
disabled him from forming any distinct purpose, or from trying to carry
out any such purpose as he did form. Perhaps he was, in his
helplessness, merely of that refugee-type which exile moulds men to: a
thing of memories and hopes, without definite aims or plans.

As the days passed, he dwelt in an outward inertness, while his dreams
and longings incessantly rehabilitated the home whose desolation he had
seen with his own eyes. It would be better to go back and suffer the
sentence of the law, and then go to live again in the place which, in
spite of his senses, he could only imagine clothed in the comfort and
state that had been stripped from it. Elbridge's talk, on the way to
West Hatboro', about the sale, and what had become of the horses and
cattle, and the plants, went for no more than the evidence of his own
eyes that they were all gone. He did not realize, except in the shocks
that the fact imparted at times, that death as well as disaster had
invaded his home. Adeline was, for the most part, still alive: in his
fond reveries she was present, and part of that home as she had always
been.

He began to flatter himself that if he went back he could contrive that
compromise with the court which his friends had failed to bring about;
he persuaded himself that if it came to a trial he c