han I could have hoped. I
could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a
four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had
not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began,
mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have
been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was
the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.

The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to
be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly
toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of
avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could
perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in
which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his
entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so.
They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that
whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very
carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that
did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger
Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot
make others feel the pathos I found in this.

After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with
us in the parlor.

My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to
see me, Mr. Tedham."

"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure
his cause.

"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs.
Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not
seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."

Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily,
"Won't you try?"

"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her.
But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your
daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come
from you, and for you."

"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that
perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."

"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.

He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the
inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my