tmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the
excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think
soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to
be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a
pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or
whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of
loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling
on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be
trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the
golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid
days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead,
or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor
thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new,
strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that
had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners.
He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that
sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of
desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to
now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard
of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going
somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless
journeys. After--as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he
lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming--his thoughts were
always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward
dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden
way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its
necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as
a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and
unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any
abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.

Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning,
unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These
especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and
spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His
first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual
racking pain was over, and nothing remained