u,
and he will be so glad."

Mary kissed Bessie for consent. "You know how much I admire Alan. He
could be anything."

"Yes, he could. If he could!"

Bessie seldom put so much earnest in anything, and Mary loved (as she
would have said) the sad sincerity, the honest hopelessness of her tone.
"We must help him. I know we can."

"We must try. But people who could--if they could--" Bessie stopped.

Her friend divined that she was no longer speaking wholly of her
brother, but she said: "There isn't any if about it; and there are no
ifs about anything if we only think so. It's a sin not to think so."

The mixture of severity and of optimism in the nature of her friend had
often amused Bessie, and it did not escape her tacit notice in even
so serious a moment as this. Her theory was that she was shocked to
recognize it now, because of its relation to her brother, but her
theories did not always agree with the facts.

That evening, however, she was truly surprised when, after a rather
belated ring at the door, the card of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Durgin came
up to her from the reception-room. Her aunt had gone to bed, and she had
a luxurious moment in which she reaped all the reward of self-denial
by supposing herself to have foregone the pleasure of seeing him, and
sending down word that she was not at home. She did not wish, indeed, to
see him, but she wished to know how he felt warranted in calling in the
evening, and it was this unworthy, curiosity which she stifled for that
luxurious moment. The next, with undiminished dignity, she said, "Ask
him to come up, Andrew," and she waited in the library for him to offer
a justification of the liberty he had taken.

He offered none whatever, but behaved at once as if he had always had
the habit of calling in the evening, or as if it was a general custom
which he need not account for in his own case. He brought her a book
which they had talked of at their last meeting, but he made no excuse or
pretext of it.

He said it was a beautiful night, and that he had found it rather warm
walking in from Cambridge. The exercise had moistened his whole rich,
red color, and fine drops of perspiration stood on his clean-shaven
upper lip and in the hollow between his under lip and his bold chin;
he pushed back the coarse, dark-yellow hair from his forehead with
his handkerchief, and let his eyes mock her from under his thick,
straw-colored eyebrows. She knew that he was enjoying his own