d there she stayed, either on the sofa or half
lost among the cushions of an arm-chair, during the evenings when
John's friends came. But by and by the house-friends one by one ceased
to drop in as they passed down the hall; other friends ceased to ring
the bell: the old lively evenings were impossible with one so frail
and delicate to be cared for.

Reyburn, to be sure, came every day, and no message could shut him
out. If Lilian was not in the parlors, he ran up stairs into the
little sitting-room: if he could not see Lilian, he would walk in and
see her mother. Sometimes John took her out to drive--to give her a
color, as he said--but he was unable to do it often, and then Reyburn
took his place till she declared she would ride no more. It was not so
easy to discover what ailed Lilian as it was to see she failed. One
doctor said she had merely functional derangement of the heart;
another talked about complicated depression of the nerves; and a third
said she was whimsical, and nothing at all was the matter with her,
and she had better marry and taste the hard realities of life, and she
would soon be cured of her follies. But Lilian firmly and quietly
refused to be married yet: possibly she knew that her emotions were
not what they should be for marriage with the man to whom she was
plighted; possibly hoped that time might make it right; possibly
wanted nothing more definite than delay. Once John impressed Reyburn
into his service in the matter: they were so thoroughly intimate, so
like brothers of one family, that he appealed to him without a second
thought. What Reyburn meant by urging her to fix the day for her
wedding with John, Lilian might have marveled had he not kept his eyes
on the floor while he spoke the few curt sentences, and held her hand
with the grip of death. It was no marriage with John that Reyburn
wanted for her, she knew too well: he also looked forward to delay.
But she told John that when she was herself again it would be time
enough to talk of marriage: she should not bind him to a dead woman.
And somehow, though the relation between her and John remained the
same, the usual evidences of it, one by one, had disappeared. If he
took her in his arms, she slipped away; if he bent to kiss her lips,
she held her cheek. Still, though caresses ceased, the tender word and
the kindly glance remained. John fancied the rest to be but a part of
the nervous whims of her illness, from which she was to recover