now of being oppressed by the heat. Excuse me for staying so long."

"Oh no," she answered, "I'm not sick. I reckon I need a little rest.
Good-evening."

Putnam lingered after she was gone. He found his way to his old bench
under the cedars and sat there for a while. He had not occupied this
seat since his first meeting with Miss Pinckney in the summer-house, and
the initials which he had whittled on its edge impressed him as
belonging to some bygone stage of his history. This was the first time
that she had questioned him about himself. His sympathy had won her
confidence, but she had treated him hitherto in an impersonal way, as
something tributary to her brother's memory, like the tombstone or the
flowers on his grave. The suspicion that he was seeking her for her own
sake had not, so far as Putnam could discover, ever entered her
thoughts.

But in the course of their next few interviews there came a change in
her behavior. The simplicity and unconsciousness of her sorrow had
become complicated with some other feeling. He caught her looking at him
narrowly once or twice, and when he looked hard at her there was visible
in her manner a soft agitation--something which in a girl of more
sanguine complexion might have been interpreted as a blush. She
sometimes suffered herself to be coaxed a little way into talking of
things remote from the subject of her sorrow. Occasionally she
questioned Putnam shyly about himself, and he needed but slight
encouragement to wax confidential. She listened quietly to his
experiences, and even smiled now and then at something that he said. His
heart beat high with triumph: he fancied that he was leading her slowly
up out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

But the upward path was a steep one. She had many sudden relapses and
changes of mood. Putnam divined that she felt her grief loosening its
tight hold on her and slipping away, and that she clung to it as a
consecrated thing with a morbid fear of losing it altogether. There were
days when her demeanor betokened a passionate self-reproach, as though
she accused herself secretly of wronging her brother and profaning his
tomb in allowing more cheerful thoughts to blunt the edge of her
bereavement. He remarked also that her eyes were often red from weeping.
There sometimes mingled with her remorse a plain resentment toward
himself. At such times she would hardly speak to him, and the slightest
gayety or even cheerfulness on his part