by evading the truth. But Helen was troubled about her, and said to Dr.
Howe, "Lois must come to see me for a while; she does need a change very
much. I'm afraid she won't be able to go with me next week, but can't she
come as soon as she is strong enough to travel?"

And so it was decided that she should come with Gifford, who would go
back to Lockhaven in about a fortnight. Business, which never reached Mr.
Denner in Mercer, had been offered the young lawyer, and he had been
willing to stay in Ashurst a little longer, though he had told himself he
was a fool.

Lois looked forward to the visit with feverish anxiety. Mr. Forsythe,
perhaps to please his mother, but certainly with rather an ill grace, had
lingered in Ashurst. But he had not been very much at the rectory;
perhaps because it was not a time to make visits, or be careless and
light-hearted, while little Mr. Denner was fading out of life, and his
mother felt herself trembling on the edge of the grave. This, at least,
was what Mrs. Forsythe said to Lois more than once, with an anxious,
troubled look, which perhaps explained more than her words did.

She had accepted very complacently Lois's protestations of joy and
gratitude that she was no longer, as she expressed it, in immediate
danger, but she did not apparently feel that that altered at all the
conditions of the promise Lois had given her, which was evidently a very
precious thing. Nor did Lois remonstrate against being held by it. She
felt she deserved any grief that came to her, and it would have been
cowardly, she thought, to shrink from what she had undertaken merely
because she had been so far mercifully spared the grief of Mrs.
Forsythe's death. And who could tell that she would live, even yet?
Certainly Mrs. Forsythe herself seemed to consider her recovery a matter
of grave doubt, and Lois's anxieties were quick to agree with her.

So she went about with a white face and eyes from which all the careless
gayety had gone, simply bearing her life with a dull pain and in constant
fear. Gifford saw it, and misunderstood it; he thought, in view of what
Miss Deborah had told him and what he knew of Mr. Forsythe's plans, that
it was natural for Lois to look unhappy. Anxieties are very misleading;
the simple explanation of remorse for her carelessness did not come into
Gifford's mind at all.

One afternoon,--it was the day following Mr. Denner's funeral,--Gifford
thought this all over, and tried to see