d then he was hurt that they ignored him. He
kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought that
it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New York,
and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the indifference
of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his local
distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the pleasant
younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up at one,
he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had outlived the
period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city as he world
once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except the basements
of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and picked up copies
of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he read them, he
sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away with
the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see, with
compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by these
means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently proposed to
go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.

He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they
should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the
winter wore away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute
instructions for getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the
book-stalls by conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife
could see that he had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find
from one as from the other.

She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and
that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl
herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope,
for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with
a kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in
one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to
the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he
lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six
weeks before he left his room.

He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and
he was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that
when his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for
him he submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. H