cience. Call it, so far as I
am concerned, a chip; call it anything you please. The fact is I have
had a Don Quixotic run in, and I have got to defend myself."

Daniel shook his head and read on. Benda knew nothing of his marriage.
He did not even seem to know that Daniel and Gertrude had been engaged.
Or if he had known it he had forgotten it. Daniel could hardly believe
his own eyes when he came to the following passage: "My greatest anxiety
always lay in the fear that you would pass Eleanore by. I was too
cowardly to tell you how I felt on this point, and I have reproached
myself ever since for my cowardice. Now that I am leaving I tell you how
I feel about this matter, though not exactly with the sensation of
performing a belated task."

For Heaven's sake, thought Daniel, what is he trying to do to me?

"I have often thought about it in quiet hours; it gave me the same
feeling of satisfaction that I have in a chemical experiment, when the
reactions of the various elements take place as they should: what
Eleanore says is your word; what you feel is Eleanore's law."

He is seeing ghosts, cried Daniel, he is tangling up the threads of my
life. What does he mean? Why does he do it?

"Don't neglect what I am telling you! Don't crush that wonderful flower!
The girl is a rare specimen; the rarest I know. You need your whole
heart with all its powers of love and kindness to appreciate her. But if
my words reach you too late, please tear this letter into shreds, and
get the whole idea out of your mind as soon and completely as possible."

"Come, let's eat," said Gertrude, as she entered the room with a dish of
pickled herring.

Eleanore was sitting on the sofa looking at Daniel quizzically. He was
lost in thought.

Daniel looked up, and studied the two women as if they were the figures
of a hallucination: the one in dark red, the other in dark blue; minor
and major keys. The two stood side by side, and yet so far removed from
each other: they were the two poles of his world.

XI

"What has Benda got to say?" asked Gertrude hesitatingly.

"Just think, he is going to Africa," replied Daniel, with a voice as if
he were lying. "Curious, isn't it? I suppose he is on the ocean by this
time."

With an expression on his face that clearly betrayed the fact that he
was afraid the sisters might somehow divine or suspect the parts of the
letter he wished to keep to himself, he read as mu