mallpox,
devised a thousand innocent deceptions by which she might break in upon
him when he sat in his study and discover whether he was actually
reading the papers or merely pretending to do so. In her natural
simplicity, it never occurred to her to penetrate beneath the surface
disturbances of his mood. These engrossed her so completely that the
cause of them was almost forgotten. Dimly she realized that this
strange, almost physical soreness, which made him shrink from her
presence as a man with weak eyes shrinks from the light, was the outward
sign of a secret violence in his soul, yet she ministered helplessly to
each passing explosion of temper as if it were the cause instead of the
result of his suffering. Introspection, which had lain under a moral ban
in a society that assumed the existence of an unholy alliance between
the secret and the evil, could not help her because she had never
indulged in it. Partly because of the ingenuous candour of the Pendleton
nature, and partly owing to the mildness of a climate which made it more
comfortable for Dinwiddians to live for six months of the year on their
front porches and with their windows open, she shared the ingrained
Southern distrust of any state of mind which could not cheerfully
support the observation of the neighbours. She knew that he had turned
from his work with disgust, and if he wasn't working and wasn't reading,
what on earth could he be doing alone unless he had, as she imagined in
desperation, begun wilfully to "nurse his despondency?" Even the rector
couldn't help her here--for his knowledge of character was strictly
limited to the types of the soldier and the churchman, and his
son-in-law did not belong, he admitted, in either of these familiar
classifications. At the bottom of his soul the good man had always
entertained for Oliver something of the kindly contempt with which his
generation regarded a healthy male, who, it suspected, would decline
either to preach a sermon or to kill a man in the cause of morality. But
on one line of treatment father and daughter were passionately
agreed--whatever happened, it was not good that Oliver should be left by
himself for a minute. When he was in the bank, of course, where Cyrus
had found him a place as a clerk on an insignificant salary, it might be
safely assumed that he was cheered by the unfailing company of his
fellow-workers; but when he came home, the responsibility of his
distraction and his cure r