more than the mere words; her heart beat through every
line.

There were still five shillings in his pocket--enough to pay the
postage on sixty letters, he grimly reflected. So far he had had no
occasion to spend money for anything else, and no beggar had crossed
his path to tempt from him the little he had. He needed nothing beyond
his food, and of that the Ketterings' hospitality provided a
sufficiency, though by the third day the over-profusion of plain
dishes was no longer maintained.

Cleo seemed to be getting mysterious letters from town, and she gave
him to understand she would be able to put her new scheme before him
very soon now, but in the meantime he must be patient. The memory of
her defeat had already almost gone from her mind, as did all things
which were disagreeable to it and which, therefore, it could not
assimilate; and, if she conversed with him at all, it was only on the
subject of her genius, her imagination making, if possible, still
more gorgeous flights than in the first days he had known her.

But this bluster about her genius only made him smile bitterly now,
for he knew but too well that the foundations of any scheme of hers
could not be laid in the good, solid earth. He could not guess the
nature of the negotiations she had apparently begun, though he had a
suspicion she was offering her genius to moneylenders as a security
for some gigantic advance. The thought made him feel some impatience.
She could not expect him, interested as he might be in her evolutions,
to stay here indefinitely, eating the bread of hard-working Simon
Kettering, even if that were not becoming daily unpleasanter. He was
already thinking that, in his next letter to Helen, he must tell her
to send him a little money, so that, even if he did not leave the
town, he could either live elsewhere or arrange to pay Kettering for
his board and lodging, thus giving Cleo a fair time in which to reveal
her hand. He would be as patient as possible with her, so that she
should not have any real ground for the least reproach to him.

By the fourth day a fuller comprehension of the family had come to
Morgan, and a growing unhappiness at living with it. His perception of
the Ketterings, at first of the same nature as a traveller's
perception of people among whom he is sojourning for the first time,
had ceased to be art. Their spirit had begun to act on his, and he now
not only saw them as a full reality, but he likewise felt them