ation to Alice was not so easily settled. She had
come to irritate him now. Her changeable, swift-witted, moody,
hysterical invalidism had begun to wear upon him intolerably. Everything
she did was wrong. It was brutal even to admit this, but he could no
longer conceal it either from himself or from her. It was deeply, sadly
painful to recall the promise, the complete confidence and happiness
with which they had both started towards the West. How sure of her
recovery they had been, how gay and confident of purpose! Now she not
only refused to listen to his demand for an early marriage, but hampered
and annoyed him in a hundred ways. As he walked the silent night he was
forced to acknowledge that she had been right in delaying their union.
And yet how dependent upon him she was. Her life was so tragically
inwound with his that to think of shaking away her hand seemed the act
of a sordid egoist.

"And even were I free, nothing is solved."

The situation took on the insoluble and the tragic. In the fashion of
well-bred, soundly nurtured American youth he had thought of such
complications only as subjects for novelists. "There must be
concealment, but not duplicity, in my attitude," he decided. He longed
for the constant light of Bertha's face, the frequent touch of her hand.
Her laughter was so endlessly charming, her step so firm, so light, so
graceful. The grace of her bosom--the sweeping line of her side--

He stopped there. In that direction lay danger. "She trusts me, and I
will repay her trust. She has chosen me to be her adviser, putting her
wealth in my hands!--Well, why not? We will see whether an honorable man
cannot carry forward even so difficult a relationship as this. I will
visit her every day, I will enjoy her hospitality as freely as Congdon,
and I will fulfil my promise to Alice--if she asks it of me."

But deep under the sombre resolution lay an unuttered belief in his
future, in his happiness--for this is the prerogative of youth. The dim
mountains, the sinking crescent moon, and the silence of the plain all
seemed somehow to prophesy both happiness and peace.

CHAPTER XXV

BERTHA'S DECISION

It was good to wake in her old room and see the morning light breaking
in golden waves against the peaks, to hear her dogs bay and to listen to
the murmuring voice of the fountains on the lawn. It was deliciously
luxurious to sit at breakfast on the vine-clad porch with the shining
new coffee-boiler