ths; and
now--ah, did he not know!

As the weeks came and went again she felt that indeed he did not
know--or care, maybe.

Some natures cling to beliefs long after conviction has been shattered.
These are they of the limited imagination, the loyal, the pertinacious,
and the affectionate, the single-hearted children of habit; blind
where they do not wish to see, stubborn where their inclinations lie,
unamenable to reason, wholly held by legitimate obligations.

But Guida was not of these. Her brain and imagination were as strong as
her affections. Her incurable honesty was the deepest thing in her; she
did not know even how to deceive herself. As her experience deepened
under the influence of a sorrow which still was joy, and a joy that
still was sorrow, her vision became acute and piercing. Her mind was
like some kaleidoscope. Pictures of things, little and big, which had
happened to her in her life, flashed by her inner vision in furious
procession. It was as if, in the photographic machinery of the brain,
some shutter had slipped from its place, and a hundred orderless and
ungoverned pictures, loosed from natural restraint, rushed by.

Five months had gone since Philip had left her: two months since she
had received his second letter, months of complexity of feeling; of
tremulousness of discovery; of hungry eagerness for news of the war; of
sudden little outbursts of temper in her household life--a new thing
in her experience; of passionate touches of tenderness towards her
grandfather; of occasional biting comments in the conversations between
the Sieur and the Chevalier, causing both gentlemen to look at each
other in silent amaze; of as marked lapses into listless disregard of
any talk going on around her.

She had been used often to sit still, doing nothing, in a sort of
physical content, as the Sieur and his visitors talked; now her hands
were always busy, knitting, sewing, or spinning, the steady gaze upon
the work showing that her thoughts were far away. Though the Chevalier
and her grandfather vaguely noted these changes, they as vaguely set
them down to her growing womanhood. In any case, they held it was not
for them to comment upon a woman or upon a woman's ways. And a girl like
Guida was an incomprehensible being, with an orbit and a system all
her own; whose sayings and doings were as little to be reduced to their
understandings as the vagaries of any star in the Milky Way or the
currents in St. Mi