e same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm
between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything
they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room
everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of more than casual
relations--Torrey, among scores of others. But he viewed each object and
each person with the same awful despairing look, his immobile lips giving
muffled passage to that eternal "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And at last they decided
they were mistaken, that it was no particular thing he wanted, but only
the natural fierce desire to break through those prison walls, invisible,
translucent, intangible, worse than death.

* * * * *

Sorrow and anxiety and care pressed so heavily and so unceasingly upon
that household for several weeks that there was no time for, no thought
of, anything but Hiram. Finally, however, the law of routine mercifully
reasserted itself; their lives, in habit and in thought, readjusted,
conformed to the new conditions, as human lives will, however chaotic has
been the havoc that demolished the old routine. Then Adelaide took from
her writing desk Ross's letters, which she had glanced at rather than
read as they came; when she finished the rereading, or reading, she was
not only as unsatisfied as when she began, but puzzled, to boot--and
puzzled that she was puzzled. She read them again--it did not take long,
for they were brief; even the first letter after he heard of her father's
illness filled only the four sides of one sheet, and was written large
and loose. "He has sent short letters," said she, "because he did not
want to trouble me with long ones at this time." But, though this excuse
was as plausible as most of those we invent to assist us to believe what
we want to believe, it did not quite banish a certain hollow, hungry
feeling, a sense of distaste for such food as the letters did provide.
She was not experienced enough to know that the expression of the
countenance of a letter is telltale beyond the expression of the
countenance of its writer; that the face may be controlled to lie, but
never yet were satisfying and fully deceptive lies told upon paper.
Without being conscious of the action of the sly, subconscious instinct
which prompted it, she began to revolve her friend, Theresa Howland,
whose house party Ross was honoring with such an extraordinarily long
lingering. "I hope Theresa is seeing that he has a good t