this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now
that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something
in the atmosphere of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his
will-power. When all about her spoke a language so different from his
own, how could he hope to make himself heard? He knew that her family
and her immediate friends--Mr. Langhope, the Gaineses, Mrs. Ansell and
Mr. Tredegar--far from being means of communication, were so many
sentinels ready to raise the drawbridge and drop the portcullis at his
approach. They were all in league to stifle the incipient feelings he
had roused in Bessy, to push her back into the deadening routine of her
former life, and the only voice that might conceivably speak for him was
Miss Brent's.

The "case" which, unexpectedly presented to her by one of the Hope
Hospital physicians, had detained Justine at Hanaford during the month
of June, was the means of establishing a friendship between herself and
Amherst. They did not meet often, or get to know each other very well;
but he saw her occasionally at his mother's and at Mrs. Dressel's, and
once he took her out to Westmore, to consult her about the emergency
hospital which was to be included among the first improvements there.
The expedition had been memorable to both; and when, some two weeks
later, Bessy wrote suggesting that she should take Miss Brent to the
Adirondacks, it seemed to Amherst that there was no one whom he would
rather have his wife choose as her companion.

He was much too busy at the time to cultivate or analyze his feeling for
Miss Brent; he rested vaguely in the thought of her, as of the "nicest"
girl he had ever met, and was frankly pleased when accident brought them
together; but the seeds left in both their minds by these chance
encounters had not yet begun to germinate.

So unperceived had been their gradual growth in intimacy that it was a
surprise to Amherst to find himself suddenly thinking of her as a means
of communication with his wife; but the thought gave him such
encouragement that, when he saw Justine in the path before him he went
toward her with unusual eagerness.

Justine, on her part, felt an equal pleasure. She knew that Bessy did
not expect her husband, and that his prolonged absence had already been
the cause of malicious comment at Lynbrook; and she caught at the hope
that this sudden return might betoken a more favourable turn of affairs.

"Oh, I am so glad to s