days Henry Stillman, although always maintaining his gentle
manner towards children and women, had become, in the depths of his
long-suffering heart, a rebel against fate. He had borne too long
that burden which is the heaviest and most ignoble in the world, the
burden of a sense of injury. He knew that he was fitted for better
things than he had. He thought that it was not his own personal fault
that he did not have them, and his very soul was curdling with a
conviction of wrong, both at the hands of men and God. In these days
he ceased going to church. He watched his wife and sister set out
every Sunday, and he stayed at home. He got a certain satisfaction
out of that. All who realize an injury have an amount of childishness
in acts of retaliation. He, Henry Stillman, actually had a conviction
that he was showing recrimination and wounding fate, which had so
injured him, if only with a pin-prick, by staying away from church.
After Maria came to live with them, she, too, went to church, but he
did not view her with the same sardonic air that he did the older
women, who had remained true to their faith in the face of disaster.
He looked at Maria, in her pretty little best gowns and hats, setting
forth, and a sweet tenderness for her love of God and belief
sweetened his own agnosticism. He would not for the world have said a
word to weaken the girl's faith nor to have kept her away from
church. He would have urged her to go had she manifested the
slightest inclination to remain at home. He was in a manner jealous
of the girl's losing what he had himself lost. He tried to refrain
from airing his morbid, bitter views of life to his wife, but once in
a while he could not restrain himself as now. However, he laughed so
naturally, and asked Maria, who presently came in, how many pupils
had been present, and how she liked school-teaching, that his wife
began to think that he had not been in earnest.

"They are such poor, dirty little things," Maria said, "and their
clothes were wet, and--and--" A look of nausea overspread her face.

"You will get used to that," said her uncle, laughing pleasantly.
"Eunice, haven't we got some cologne somewhere?"

Eunice got a bottle of cologne, which was seldom used, being a
luxury, from a closet in the sitting-room, and put some on Maria's
handkerchief. "You won't think anything about it after a little,"
said she, echoing her husband.

"I suppose the scholars in Lowe Academy were a diffe