ure about the
next. I haven't known whether the trouble, or difference, as perhaps
I had better put it, was with her or myself."

Henry nodded still more emphatically. "That's just the way it's
seemed to me, and we 'ain't either of us imagined it. It's so," said
he.

"Have you any idea--"

"No, I haven't the least. But my wife's got something on her mind,
and she's had something on her mind for a long time. It ain't
anything new."

"Why don't you ask her?"

"I have asked her, and she says that of course she's got something on
her mind, that she ain't a fool. You can't get around Sylvia. She
never would tell anything unless she wanted to. She ain't like most
women."

Just then Horace turned the corner of the street leading to his
school, and the conversation ceased, with an enjoinder on his part to
Henry not to be disturbed about it, as he did not think it could be
anything serious.

Henry's reply rang back as the two men went their different ways. "I
don't suppose it can be anything serious," he said, almost angrily.

Horace, however, was disposed to differ with him. He argued that a
woman of Sylvia Whitman's type does not change her manner and grow
introspective for nothing. He was inclined to think there might be
something rather serious at the bottom of it all. His imagination,
however, pictured some disease, which she was concealing from all
about her, but which caused her never-ceasing anxiety and perhaps
pain.

That night he looked critically at her and was rather confirmed in
his opinion. Sylvia had certainly grown thin, and the lines in her
face had deepened into furrows. She looked much older than she had
done before she had received her inheritance. At the same time she
puzzled Horace by looking happier, albeit in a struggling sort of
fashion. Either Rose or the inheritance was the cause of the
happiness. Horace was inclined to think it was Rose, especially since
she seemed to him more than ever the source of all happiness and
further from his reach.

That night he had found in the post-office a story of whose
acceptance he had been almost sure, accompanied by the miserable
little formula which arouses at once wrath and humiliation. Horace
tore it up and threw the pieces along the road. There was a
thunder-shower coming up. It scattered the few blossoms remaining on
the trees, and many leaves, and the bits of the civilly hypocritical
note of thanks and rejection flew with them upon the wings of