e library across the hall.
Here one day by accident she met him. He did not at first note her
coming, and she had opportunity now carefully to regard him, as he
stood moodily looking out over the lawn. Always a tall man, and
large, his figure had fined down in the confinement of the last few
weeks. It seemed to her that she saw the tinge of gray crawling a
little higher on his temples. His face was not yet thin, yet in
some way the lines of the mouth and jaw seemed stronger, more
deeply out. It was a face not sullen, yet absorbed, and above all
full, now, of a settled melancholy.

"Good morning," said he, smiling, as he saw her. "Come in. I want
to talk to you. But please don't resume our old argument about the
compromise, and about slavery and the rights of man. You've been
trying--all these weeks when I've been down and helpless and
couldn't either fight or run away--to make me be a Bentonite, or
worse, an abolitionist--trying, haven't you? to make me an
apostate, faithless to my state, my beliefs, my traditions--and I
suppose you'd be shrewd enough to add, faithless to my material
interests. Please don't, this morning. I don't want subjective
thought. I don't want algebra. I don't want history or law, or
medicine. I want--"

She stood near the window, at some distance removed from him, even
as she passed stopping to tidy Up a disarranged article on the
tables here or there. He smiled again at this. "Where is Sally?"
he asked. "And how about your maid?"

"Some one must do these things," she answered. "Your servants need
watching. Sally is never where I can find her. Jeanne I can
always find--but it is with her young man, Hector!"

He shook his head impatiently. "It all comes on you--work like
this. What could I have done without you? But yourself, how are
you coming on? That arm of yours has pained me--"

"It ceased to trouble me some time since. The doctor says, too,
that you'll be quite well, soon. That's fine."

He nodded. "It's wonderful, isn't it?" said he. "You did it.
Without you I'd be out there." He nodded toward the window, beyond
which the grass-grown stones of the little family graveyard might
be seen. "You're wonderful."

He wheeled painfully toward her presently, "Listen. We two are
alone here, in spite of ourselves. Face to face again, in spite of
all, and well enough, now, both of us, to go back to our firing
lines before long. We have come closer together tha