sunken, and with the lids pinched
by suffering; the cheeks somewhat thin, but not colorless; the long
chin, the clear forehead, and the massed brown hair, that seemed too
heavy for the drooping neck. It was not the modern athletic type; it
was rather of the earlier period, when beauty was associated with the
fragility despised by a tanned and golfing generation. Ellen Kenton's
wrists were thin, and her hands long and narrow. As he looked at her
across the racks during those two days of storm, he had sometimes the
wish to take her long, narrow hands in his, and beg her to believe that
he was worthier her serious friendship than he had shown himself. What
he was sure of at all times now was that he wished to know the secret
of that patient pathos of hers. She was not merely, or primarily, an
invalid. Her family had treated her as an invalid, but, except Lottie,
whose rigor might have been meant sanatively, they treated her more with
the tenderness people use with a wounded spirit; and Breckon fancied
moments of something like humility in her, when she seemed to cower from
his notice. These were not so imaginable after her family took to their
berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a
sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child
might show at some incomprehensible harm. It was this grief which he had
refused not merely to know--he still doubted his right to know it--but
to share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and
had exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with
the fair weather, he felt himself farther from her than before their
acquaintance began.

He had made an overture to its renewal in the book he lent her, and then
Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter had appeared on deck, and borne down
upon him when he was walking with Lottie Kenton and trying to begin his
self-retrieval through her. She had left him; but they had not, and in
the bonds of a prophet and his followers he found himself bound with
them for much more conversation than he had often held with them ashore.
The parochial duties of an ethical teacher were not strenuous, and
Breckon had not been made to feel them so definitely before. Mrs.
Rasmith held that they now included promising to sit at her table for
the rest of the voyage; but her daughter succeeded in releasing him from
the obligation; and it was she who smilingly detached the clinging
hold of the elder lady.