e
reason. Uncle Henry decided that he wasn't strong enough for the trip,
or something."

"Then--is she--is she here?"

"No; Helen is never here in summer. When she came back from Plattville,
she went north, somewhere, to join people she had promised, I think."
Meredith had as yet no inkling or suspicion that his adopted cousin had
returned to Plattville. What he told Harkless was what his aunt had told
him, and he accepted it as the truth.

Mrs. Sherwood (for she was both Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood) had always
considered Fisbee an enigmatic rascal, and she regarded Helen's
defection to him in the light of a family scandal to be hushed up, as
well as a scalding pain to be borne. Some day the unkind girl-errant
would "return to her wisdom and her duty"; meanwhile, the less known
about it the better.

Meredith talked very little to Harkless of his cousin, beyond lightly
commenting on the pleasure and oddity of their meeting, and telling
him of her friendly anxiety about his recovery; he said she had perfect
confidence from the first that he would recover. Harkless had said a
word or two in his delirium and a word or two out of it, and these,
with once a sudden brow of suffering, and a difference Meredith felt in
Helen's manner when they stood together by the sick man's bedside, had
given the young man a strong impression, partly intuitive, that in spite
of the short time the two had known each other, something had happened
between them at Plattville, and he ventured a guess which was not far
from the truth. Altogether, the thing was fairly plain--a sad lover
is not so hard to read--and Meredith was sorry, for they were the two
people he liked best on earth.

The young man carried his gay presence daily to the hospital, where
Harkless now lay in a pleasant room of his own, and he tried to keep
his friend cheery, which was an easy matter on the surface, for the
journalist turned ever a mask of jokes upon him; but it was not hard
for one who liked him as Meredith did to see through to the melancholy
underneath. After his one reference to Helen, John was entirely silent
of her, and Meredith came to feel that both would be embarrassed if
occasion should rise and even her name again be mentioned between them.

He did not speak of his family connection with Mr. Fisbee to the
invalid, for, although the connection was distant, the old man was, in a
way, the family skeleton, and Meredith had a strong sense of the decency
of reser