Chatterton would keep it up. He watched her, as one haunted guest
watches another, to know if she too has seen the specter of the
house, observing her manner and her appetite at breakfast, the
expression of her face at bedtime, her voice in saying good-morning
and good-night. On the third day he thought he could detect a slight
flagging; Miss Chatterton was a shade less buoyant, less talkative
than before. By the evening she was positively serious, and he
judged that the iron had entered into her soul. Her manner to her
cousin had changed; it was more tentative, more tender, more
maternal. She had begun to pity Frida, as he had pitied her.

The two were inseparable; they were always putting their heads
together, always exchanging confidences. And it was not only
confidences but characters that they exchanged. It was a positive
fact that as Miss Chatterton flagged Miss Tancred revived, she
seemed to be actually growing young while the young girl grew older.
Not that Miss Tancred grew young without difficulty; the life she
had led was against that. She looked like a woman recovering from a
severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse, she went about
in a flush and fever of convalescence; it was a struggle for health
under desperate conditions, the agony of a strong constitution still
battling with the atmosphere that poisoned it, recovery simulating
disease, disease counterfeiting recovery.

A wholesome process, no doubt, but decidedly unpleasant to watch.
Durant, however, had very little opportunity for watching it, as he
was now left completely to himself. Miss Tancred's manner intimated
that she had done with him,--put him away in some dark cupboard of
the soul, like a once desired and now dreaded stimulant,--that she
was trusting to other and safer means for building up her strength.
If Durant had ever longed for solitude, he had more than enough of
it now, and he devoted the rest of his time to finishing the studies
and sketches he had begun. He had made none of Miss Tancred.

One morning he had pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge
on the far slope of the fir plantation. A thorn bush sheltered him
from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace of grass above
him.

He had emerged from a fit of more than usual absorption when he felt
the stir of footsteps in the grass, and a voice rang out clear from
the terrace.

"If it would only make papa happy. I want him to be happy."

Durant could