brook. He will
count upon it, I know; he's so much interested in the discussions he has
been having with you."

She gave the old man her hand for good-by, after she had artfully stood
him up, in a double hope,--a hope that he would understand that there
was some limit to her husband's nervous strength, and a hope that her
closing invitation would keep him from feeling anything personal in her
hints.

Hilbrook took his leave in the dreamy fashion age has with so many
things, as if there were a veil between him and experience which kept
him from the full realization of what had happened; and as she watched
his bent shoulders down the garden walk, carrying his forward-drooping
head at a slant that scarcely left the crown of his hat visible, a fear
came upon her which made it impossible for her to recount all the facts
of her interview to her husband. It became her duty, rather, to conceal
what was painful to herself in it, and she merely told him that Mr.
Hilbrook had taken it all in the right way, and she had made him promise
to come and see them as soon as they got back.

XIV.

Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert's course in so many respects
that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up
wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it
was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his
vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the
place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies,
and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She
addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom
Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that
he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these
so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt
it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert's intellectual quality stagger
on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the
work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole
community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on
this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame.
After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband's
collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university
people, so galling to a sensitive nature.

She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied i