t with blithe
derision, but she said that he need not tell _her_, and in confirming
herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had
preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only
intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which
he found in the old man's society. When she discovered, after the fact,
that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so
severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an
act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity.
She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook's failure to
reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man's silence.
But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were
essential to her husband's comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her
care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her
devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There
was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight
and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of
the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another
man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about
not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a
woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke
after she fully understood it.

"All that I ask," she said, as if it followed, "is that you won't spoil
everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life
out of you again."

"I won't," he retorted, "if you'll promise to make the university people
come regularly to my sermons."

He treated the notion of Hilbrook's visits lightly; but with his return
to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an
experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the
first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with
an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its
defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms
would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and
though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an
accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with
nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other
cause. His wife came in and out, with what he kne