eed, a trying summer for our emotions, torn as we were
between our pity for Mrs. Bentley and our compassion for her daughter.
We had no repose, except when we centred our sympathies upon
Glendenning, whom we could yearn over in tender regret without doing any
one else wrong, or even criticising another. He was our great stay in
that respect, and though a mere external witness might have thought that
he had the easiest part, we who knew his gentle and affectionate nature
could not but feel for him. We never concealed from ourselves certain
foibles of his; I have hinted at one, and we should have liked it better
if he had not been so sensible of the honor, from a worldly point, of
being engaged to Miss Bentley. But this was a very innocent vanity, and
he would have been willing to suffer for her mother and for herself, if
she had let him. I have tried to insinuate how she would not let him,
but freed him as much as possible from the stress of the situation, and
assumed for him a mastery, a primacy, which he would never have assumed
for himself. We thought this very pretty of her, and in fact she was
capable of pretty things. What was hard and arrogant in her, and she was
not without something of the kind at times, was like her mother; but
even she, poor soul, had her good points, as I have attempted to
suggest. We used to dwell upon them, when our talk with Glendenning grew
confidential, as it was apt to do; for it seemed to console him to
realize that her daughter and he were making their sacrifice to a not
wholly unamiable person.

He confided equally in my wife and myself, but there were times when I
think he rather preferred the counsel of a man friend. Once when we had
gone a walk into the country, which around Gormanville is of the
pathetic Mid-Massachusetts loveliness and poverty, we sat down in a
hillside orchard to rest, and he began abruptly to talk of his affair.
Sometimes, he said, he felt that it was all an error, and he could not
rid himself of the fear that an error persisted in was a wrong, and
therefore a species of sin.

"That is very interesting," I said. "I wonder if there is anything in
it? At first blush it looks so logical; but is it? Or are you simply
getting morbid? What is the error? What is your error?"

"You know," he said, with a gentle refusal of my willingness to make
light of his trouble. "It is surely an error to allow a woman to give
her word when she can promise nothing more, and to le