he had but delayed that act till after his visit to Miss
Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often before, he felt his sense
of things cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs. Newsome, in
answer to her own, had consisted of the words: "Judge best to take
another month, but with full appreciation of all re-enforcements." He
had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it
was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make
him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing
something: so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his
recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of
make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by the
American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of
the great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn't he
writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind?--since it had
become quite his habit not to like to read himself over. On those
lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling
in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in
the dark now pressed on him more sharply--creating thereby the need for
a louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending
his message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad's news;
there was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him.
He had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to
say, though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn't be in
her power to say--it shouldn't be in any one's anywhere to say--that he
was neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely,
but he had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a
reason at Woollett that he wished to fill the void created there by
Sarah's departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have
called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost
nothing. He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than
before, and he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs.
Newsome's letters could but logically stop. He hadn't had a line for
many days, and he needed no proof--though he was, in time, to have
plenty--that she wouldn't have put pen to paper after receiving the
hint that had determined her telegram. She wouldn't write till Sarah
should have seen him a