tockings. He
had given her a new confidence in herself--in a strength within her
somewhere beneath the weakness she was always seeing and feeling.

Not until she thought it out afterward did she realize what they
were passing through, what frightful days of failure he was
enduring. He acted like the steady-nerved gambler at life that
he was. He was not one of those more or less weak losers who
have to make desperate efforts to conceal a fainting heart. His
heart was not fainting. He simply played calmly on, feeling that
the next throw was as likely to be for as against him. She kept
close to her room, walking about there--she had never been much
of a sitter--thinking, practicing the new songs he had got for
her--character songs in which he trained her as well as he could
without music or costume or any of the accessories. He also had
an idea for a church scene, with her in a choir boy's costume,
singing the most moving of the simple religious songs to organ
music. She from time to time urged him to take her on the rounds
with him. But he stood firm, giving always the same reason of
the custom in the profession. Gradually, perhaps by some form of
that curious process of infiltration that goes on between two
minds long in intimate contact, the conviction came to her that
the reason he alleged was not his real reason; but as she had
absolute confidence in him she felt that there was some good
reason or he would not keep her in the background--and that his
silence about it must be respected. So she tried to hide from
him how weary and heartsick inaction was making her, how hard it
was for her to stay alone so many hours each day.

As he watched her closely, it soon dawned on him that something
was wrong, and after a day or so he worked out the explanation.
He found a remedy--the reading room of the public library where
she could make herself almost content the whole day long.

He began to have a haggard look, and she saw he was sick, was
keeping up his strength with whisky. "It's only this infernal
summer cold I caught in the smashup," he explained. "I can't
shake it, but neither can it get me down. I'd not dare fall
sick. What'd become of _us_?"

She knew that "us" meant only herself. Her mind had been aging
rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection. To develop
a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is
too much company, too little time to digest and assimilate, that
ke