d
him upon many more problems and predicaments of life than could have yet
beset any boy's experience, probably with the wish to make provision for
any possible contingency of the future. The admirable principles which
Boyne evolved for his guidance from their conversation were formulated
with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling
his laughter in his pillow. He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to
weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable
levity. With his sense of being really very light at most times, and
with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with
Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding to her
frankness was concerned, been close. He relished the unsparing honesty
with which she had denounced him, and though he did not yet know his
outcast condition with relation to her, he could not think of her
without a smile of wholly disinterested liking. He did not know, as a
man of earlier date would have known, all that the little button in the
judge's lapel meant; but he knew that it meant service in the civil war,
a struggle which he vaguely and impersonally revered, though its details
were of much the same dimness for him as those of the Revolution and
the War of 1812. The modest distrust which had grown upon the bold
self-confidence of Kenton's earlier manhood could not have been more
tenderly and reverently imagined; and Breckon's conjecture of things
suffered for love's sake against sense and conviction in him were his
further tribute to a character which existed, of course, mainly in this
conjecture. It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the
subjection to his wife's, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless
becomes, a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the
actual performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in
deference to the good woman. She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a
sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having
no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her
mother's devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant
barometer. It had become apparent that Miss Kenton was her father's
favorite in a special sense, and that his partial affection for her
was of much older date than her mother's. Not less charming than her
fondness for her father was the openness with which she disabled his
wisdom because