looked at him she saw that he was greatly changed; her one glance
in the court-room had not told her how greatly. Part of it was due
doubtless to the effects of his wound, to the unaccustomed confinement
in the heats of a lowland summer; his face, though still bronzed, was
thin, his clothes hung loosely from his broad shoulders. But the marked
alteration was in his expression. This was so widely different from
that of the brown-eyed lounger of Caryl's, that it seemed another man
who was standing there, and not the same. Heathcote's eyes were still
brown; but their look was so changed that Gregory Dexter would never
have occasion to find fault with it again. His half-indolent
carelessness had given place to a stern reticence; his indifference, to
a measured self-control. And Anne knew, as though a prophetic vision
were passing, that he would carry that changed face always, to his
life's end.

Miss Teller had related to him their plan, their womans' plan. He was
strongly, unyieldingly, opposed to it. Miss Teller came home every day,
won over to his view, and then as regularly changed her mind, in talking
with Anne, and went back--to be converted over again. But he knew that
Anne had persisted. He knew that he was now expected to search his
memory, and see if he could not find there something new. Miss Teller,
with a touching eagerness to be of use and business-like, arranged pen,
paper, and ink upon the table, and sat down to take notes. She was still
a majestic personage, in spite of her grief and anxiety; her height,
profile, and flowing draperies were as imposing as ever. But in other
ways she had grown suddenly old; her light complexion was now
over-spread with a net-work of fine small wrinkles, the last faint
blonde of her hair was silvered, and in her cheeks and about her mouth
there was a pathetic alteration, the final predominance of old age, and
its ineffective helplessness over her own mild personality.

But while they waited, he found that he could not speak. When he saw
them sitting there in their mourning garb for Helen, when he felt that
Anne too was within the circle of this grief and danger and pain, Anne,
in all her pure fair youth and trust and courage, something rose in his
throat and stopped utterance. All the past and his own part in it
unrolled itself before him like a judgment; all the present, and her
brave effort for him; the future, near and dark. For Heathcote, like
Dexter, believed that the c