erable to him in any slowly
harrowing grief. To watch Virginia nursing every memory of her father
because she shrank from the subtle disloyalty of forgetfulness, aroused
in him a curious mingling of sympathy and resentment.

"I wish you'd go, even if you don't feel like it--just to please me,
Virginia," he urged, and after a short struggle she yielded to his
altered tone, and got down her hat from the shelf of the wardrobe.

A little later, as the dog-cart rolled out of Dinwiddie into the country
road, she looked through her black grenadine veil on a world which
appeared to have lost its brightness. The road was the one along which
she had ridden on the morning of the fox-hunt; ahead of them lay the
same fields, sown now with the tender green of the spring; the same
creeks ran there, screened by the same thickets of elder; the same pines
wafted their tang on the March wind that blew, singing, out of the
forest. It was all just as it had been on that morning--and yet what a
difference!

"Put up your veil, Virginia--it's enough to smother you."

But she only shook her head, shrinking farther down into the shapeless
borrowed dress as though she felt that it protected her. Following the
habit of people whose choice has been instinctive rather than
deliberate, a choice of the blood, not of the brain, they had long ago
exhausted the fund of conversation with which they had started. There
was nothing to talk about--since Virginia had never learned to talk of
herself, and Oliver had grown reticent recently about the subjects that
interested him. When the daily anecdotes of the children had been aired
between them with an effort at breeziness, nothing remained except the
endless discussion of Harry's education. Even this had worn threadbare
of late, and with the best intentions in the world, Virginia had failed
to supply anything else of sufficient importance to take its place. An
inherited habit, the same habit which had made it possible for Mrs.
Pendleton to efface her broken heart, prompted her to avoid any allusion
to her grief in which she sat shrouded as in her mourning veil.

"The spring is so early this year," she remarked once, with her gaze on
the rosy billows of an orchard. "The peach trees have almost finished
blooming."

Then, as he made no answer except to flick at John Henry's bay mare
with his whip, she asked daringly, "Are you writing again, Oliver?"

A frown darkened his forehead, and she saw the muscles