XIII.

Breckon had not seen the former interest between himself and Ellen
lapse to commonplace acquaintance without due sense of loss. He suffered
justly, but he did not suffer passively, or without several attempts
to regain the higher ground. In spite of these he was aware of being
distinctly kept to the level which he accused himself of having chosen,
by a gentle acquiescence in his choice more fatal than snubbing. The
advances that he made across the table, while he still met Miss Kenton
alone there, did not carry beyond the rack supporting her plate. She
talked on whatever subject he started with that angelic sincerity which
now seemed so far from him, but she started none herself; she did not
appeal to him for his opinion upon any question more psychological than
the barometer; and,

"In a tumultuous privacy of storm,"

he found himself as much estranged from her as if a fair-weather crowd
had surrounded them. He did not believe that she resented the levity he
had shown; but he had reason to fear that she had finally accepted it as
his normal mood, and in her efforts to meet him in it, as if he had no
other, he read a tolerance that was worse than contempt. When he tried
to make her think differently, if that was what she thought of him,
he fancied her rising to the notion he wished to give her, and then
shrinking from it, as if it must bring her the disappointment of some
trivial joke.

It was what he had taught her to expect of him, and he had himself to
blame. Now that he had thrown that precious chance away, he might well
have overvalued it. She had certain provincialisms which he could not
ignore. She did not know the right use of will and shall, and would and
should, and she pronounced the letter 'r' with a hard mid-Western twist.
Her voice was weak and thin, and she could not govern it from being at
times a gasp and at times a drawl. She did not dress with the authority
of women who know more of their clothes than the people they buy them
of; she did not carry herself like a pretty girl; she had not the
definite stamp of young-ladyism. Yet she was undoubtedly a lady in every
instinct; she wore with pensive grace the clothes which she had not
subjected to her personal taste; and if she did not carry herself like a
pretty girl, she had a beauty which touched and entreated.

More and more Breckon found himself studying her beauty--her soft, brown
brows, her gentle, dark eyes, a little