f something summary on her
part, and he did not know what to make of the cheerful parting between
them. "Well, I bid you good-evening, ma'am," he heard old Hilbrook say
briskly, and his wife return sweetly, "Good-night, Mr. Hilbrook. You
must come soon again."

"You may put your mind at rest, Clarence," she said, as she reentered
the dining room and met his face of surprise. "He didn't come to make a
call; he just wanted to borrow a book,--Physical Theory of another
Life."

"How did you find it?" asked Ewbert, with relief.

"It was where it always was," she returned indifferently. "Mr. Hilbrook
seemed to be very much interested in something you said to him about it.
I do believe you _have_ done him good, Clarence; and now, if you can
only get a full night's rest, I shall forgive him. But I hope he won't
come _very_ soon again, and will never stay so late when he does come.
Promise me you won't go near him till he's brought the book back!"

XII.

Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk
about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept
well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon
promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but
Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his
apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world
of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he
might confirm himself from Ewbert's faith and reason in the conjectures
with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a
future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and
Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual
forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case
was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse
himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook's claim to all that he could
give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he
supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert's censoriously anxious eye
the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that
Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he
would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not
some trick of his own imagination.

He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a
certain perfunctory quality in his performanc