let him escape, and they inculpated her in a high
degree of heartless flirtation. They knew how sweet Dan was, and they
believed him most sincere and good. He had been brilliantly popular in
college, and he was as bright as he could be. What was it she chose not
to like in him? They vexed themselves with asking how or in what way she
thought herself better. They would not have had her love Dan, but they
were hot against her for not loving him.

They did not question him, but they tried in every way to find out how
much he was hurt, and they watched him in every word and look for signs
of change to better or worse, with a growing belief that he was not very
much hurt.

It could not be said that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun
to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as
people do in their bereavements by death. His consciousness habituated
itself to the facts as something irretrievable. He no longer framed
in his mind situations in which the past was restored. He knew that he
should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them,
in which he experienced that life had objects besides love. There were
times when he tingled with all the anguish of the first moment of
his rejection, when he stopped in whatever he was doing, or stood
stock-still, as a man does when arrested by a physical pang, breathless,
waiting. There were other times when he went about steeped in gloom so
black that all the world darkened with it, and some mornings when he
woke he wished that the night had lasted for ever, and felt as if the
daylight had uncovered his misery and his shame to every one. He never
knew when he should have these moods, and he thought he should have them
as long as he lived. He thought this would be something rather fine. He
had still other moods, in which he saw an old man with a grey moustache,
like Colonel Newcome, meeting a beautiful white-haired lady; the man had
never married, and he had not seen this lady for fifty years. He bent
over, and kissed her hand.

"You idiot!" said Mavering to himself. Throughout he kept a good
appetite. In fact, after that first morning in Portland, he had been
hungry three times a day with perfect regularity. He lost the idea
of being sick; he had not even a furred tongue. He fell asleep pretty
early, and he slept through the night without a break. He had to laugh
a great deal with his mother and sisters, since he could not very well
mo