ng, yet he
wondered more that he had not dared to talk longer. In all this he never
thought of social grades, as he had done in connection with the smiles
of the Miss Browns. Sophia Rexford had struck his fancy more as a
superior being; and to angels, or to the Madonna, we do not seek to
recommend ourselves by position or pedigree.

The strong, clear evening light, tinted with gold, was upon everything.
He felt that if he could but live near the woman he had left, the
problem of living would become simple, and the light of life's best
hours would shine for him always; but he entered into no fine
distinction of ideal friendships.

CHAPTER V.

In the meantime the elder of the brothers Trenholme had not the
satisfaction of meeting with Sophia Rexford, or of going to see the
strange old man laid away in his last resting-place.

Robert Trenholme lay in his house, suffering a good deal of physical
pain, suffering more from restlessness of nerve caused by his former
tense activity, suffering most from the consideration of various things
which were grievous to him.

He had been flouted by the woman he loved. The arrow she had let fly had
pierced his heart and, through that, his understanding. He never told
her, or anyone, how angry he had been at the first stab that wounded,
nor that, when the familiar sound of his brother's voice came to him in
the midst of this anger, he had been dumb rather than claim kindred in
that place with the young man who, by his actions, had already taken up
the same reproach. No, he never told them that it was more in surly rage
than because he had slipped in the ditch that he had let them go on
without him in the darkness; but he knew that this had been the case;
and, although he was aware of no momentous consequences following on
this lapse, he loathed himself for it, asking by what gradual steps he
had descended to be capable of such a moment of childish and churlish
temper. He was a product of modern culture, and had the devil who had
overcome him been merely an unforgiving spirit, or the spirit of
sarcastic wit or of self-satisfied indifference, he might hardly have
noticed that he had fallen from the high estate of Christian manhood,
even though the fiend jumped astride his back and ambled far on him; but
when he found that he had been overcome by a natural impulse of
passionate wrath he was appalled, and was philosopher enough to look for
the cause of such weakness prior to the