he is."

Her brother thought for the moment that she was raving. The next she
caught her shawl over her head, hoodwise, the wind tossing her bright
hair, and declared that she was cold, and upbraided him for bringing
her on this long, chilling tramp, and protested that she would come
never again.

He came often afterward. The spot seemed to have a fascination for
him. And within sound of the cheerful hubbub and busy whir of the
industry he would lean over the palings and look at the grave, covered
sometimes with a drift of leaves, and sometimes with a drift of snow,
and think of the two men that it had successively housed, and nurse
his grudge against the company. With an unreasoning hatred of it,
Hanway felt that both were victims of the great strong corporation
that was to reap the value of the discovery which was not its own save
by accident. He could not appraise the justice of the dispensation by
which the keen observation of the one man, and the science and
experience that the other had brought to the enterprise, should fall
so far short of achievement, while an idle story, the gossip of the
day, should fill the hands of those who were strangers to the very
thought. He grudged every augury of success; he welcomed every detail
of difficulty. As time went on, the well was said to be of
intermittent flow, and new borings resulted in naught but vast floods
of sulphur water. Finally, when the admitted truth pervaded the
community,--that the oil was practically exhausted, that it had long
since ceased to pay expenses, that the company was a heavy loser by
the enterprise,--he was as a man appeased.

The result was succeeded by a change in Narcissa so radical and
immediate that Constant Hite could but perceive the fact that it was
induced by the failure and abandonment of the work. She grew placid as
of yore, and was softened, and now and again the gentle melancholy
into which she fell suggested sad and reminiscent pleasure rather than
the remorseful and desperate sorrow that she had known. He began to
realize that it was no sentimental and love-stricken grief she had
felt for Selwyn, but a sympathy akin to his own and to her brother's;
and since the disappointment of the hope of fortune must needs have
come to Selwyn at last, they made shift to resign themselves, and were
wont to talk freely of the dead with that affectionate and immediate
interest which seems to prolong the span of a mortal's day on earth,
like the