During the hot days and nights of the next few weeks Tredennis found life rather a dreary affair. Gradually the familiar faces he met on the avenue became fewer and fewer; the houses he knew one after another assumed their air of summer desertion, offering as their only evidences of life an occasional colored servant sunning him or herself on the steps; the crowds of nursery-maids, with their charges, thinned out in the parks, and the freshness of the leaves was lost under a coating of dust, while the countenances of those for whom there was no prospect of relief expressed either a languid sense of injury or the patience of despair.

"But, after all," Tredennis said, on two or three occasions, as he sat in one of the parks in the evening,—"after all, I suppose most of them have—an object," adding the last two words with a faint smile.

He was obliged to confess to himself that of late he found that the work which he had regarded as his object had ceased to satisfy him. He gave his attention to it with stern persistence, and refused to spare himself when he found his attention wandering; he even undertook additional labor, writing in his moments of leisure several notable articles upon various important questions of the day, and yet he had time left to hang heavily on his hands and fill him with weariness; and at last there came an evening when, after sitting in one of the parks until the lamps were lighted, he rose suddenly from his seat, and spoke as if to the silence and shadow about him.

"Why should I try to hide the truth from myself?" he said. "It is too late for that. I may as well face it like a man, and bear it like one. Many a brave [Pg 160]fellow has carried a bullet in his body down to his grave, and seldom winced. This is something like that, I suppose, only that pain"—And he drew a sharp, hard breath, and walked away down the deserted path without ending the sentence.

He made a struggle after this to resist one poor temptation which beset him daily,—the temptation to pass through the street in which stood the familiar house, with its drawn blinds and closed doors. Sometimes, when he rose in the morning, he was so filled with an unreasoning yearning for a sight of its blankness that he was overwhelmed by it, and went out before he breakfasted.

"It is weakness and self-indulgence," he would say; "but it is a very little thing, and it can hurt no one—it is only a little thing, after all." And he found a piteous pleasure—at which at first he tried to smile, but at which before long he ceased even to try to smile—in the slow walk down the street, on which he could see this window or that, and remember some day when he had caught a glimpse of Bertha through it, or some night he had spent in the room within when she had been gayer than usual, or quieter,—when she had given him some new wound, perhaps, or when she had half-healed an old one in some mood of relenting he had not understood.

"There is no reason why I should understand any woman," was his simple thought. "And why should I understand her, unless she chose to let me? She is like no other woman."

He was quite sure of this. In his thoughts of her he found every word and act of hers worth remembering and even repeating mentally again and again for the sake of the magnetic grace which belonged only to herself, and it never once occurred to him that his own deep sympathy and tender fancy might brighten all she did.

"When she speaks," he thought, "how the dullest of them stir and listen! When she moves across a room, how natural it is to turn and look at her, and be [Pg 161]interested in what she is going to do! What life I have seen her put in some poor, awkward wretch by only seating herself near him and speaking to him of some common thing! One does not know what her gift is, and whether it is well for her or ill that it was given her, but one sees it in the simplest thing she does."

It was hard to avoid giving himself up to such thoughts as these, and when he most needed refuge from them he always sought it in the society of the professor; so there were few evenings when he did not spend an hour or so with him, and their friendship grew and waxed strong until there could scarcely have been a closer bond between them.

About two weeks after Richard Amory\'s departure, making his call later than usual one evening, he met, coming down the steps, Mr. Arbuthnot, who stopped, with his usual civility, to shake hands with him.

"It is some weeks since we have crossed each other\'s paths, colonel," he said, scrutinizing him rather closely: "and, in the meantime, I am afraid you have not been well."

"Amory called my attention to the fact a short time ago," responded Tredennis, "and so did the professor. So, perhaps, there is some truth in it. I hadn\'t noticed it myself."

"You will presently, I assure you," said Arbuthnot, still regarding him with an air of interest. "Perhaps Washington doesn\'t agree with you. I have heard of people who couldn\'t stand it. They usually called it malaria, but I think there was generally something"—He checked himself somewhat abruptly, which was a rather unusual demonstration on his part, as it was his habit to weigh his speech with laudable care and deliberation. "You are going to see the professor?" he inquired.

"Yes," answered Tredennis.

The idea was presenting itself to his mind that there was a suggestion of something unusual in the questioner\'s[Pg 162] manner; that it was not so entirely serene as was customary; that there was even a hint of some inward excitement strong enough to be repressed only by an effort. And the consciousness of this impressed itself upon him even while a flow of light talk went on, and Arbuthnot smiled at him from his upper step.

"I have been to see the professor, too," he was saying, "and I felt it was something of an audacity. His invitations to me have always been of the most general nature; but I thought I would take the liberty of pretending that I fancied he regarded them seriously. He was very good to me, and exhibited wonderful presence of mind in not revealing that he was surprised to see me. I tried not to stay long enough to tire him, and he was sufficiently amiable to ask me to come again. He evidently appreciated the desolation of my circumstances."

"You are finding it dull?" said Tredennis.

"Dull!" repeated Arbuthnot. "Yes; I think you might call it dull. The people who kindly condescend to notice me in the winter have gone away, and my dress-coat is packed in camphor. I have ceased to be useful; and, even if Fate had permitted me to be ornamental, where should I air my charms? There seems really no reason why I should exist, until next winter, when I may be useful again, and receive in return my modicum of entertainment. To be merely a superior young man in a department is not remunerative in summer, as one ceases to glean the results of one\'s superiority. At present I might as well be inferior, and neither dance, nor talk, nor sing, and be utterly incapacitated by nature for either carrying wraps or picking up handkerchiefs; and you cannot disport yourself at the watering-places of the rich and great on a salary of a hundred dollars a month; and you could only get your sordid \'month\'s leave,\' if such a thing were possible."

"I—have been dull myself," said Tredennis, hesitantly.

"If it should ever occur to you to drop in and see a[Pg 163] fellow-sufferer," said Arbuthnot, "it would relieve the monotony of my lot, at least, and might awaken in me some generous emotions."

Tredennis looked up at him.

"It never has occurred to you so far, I see," was Arbuthnot\'s light reply to the look; "but, if it should, don\'t resist the impulse. I can assure you it is a laudable one. And my humble apartment has the advantage of comparative coolness."

When Tredennis entered the library he found the professor sitting in his usual summer seat, near the window. A newspaper lay open on his knee, but he was not reading it; he seemed, indeed, to have fallen into a reverie of a rather puzzling kind.

"Did you meet any one as you came in?" he asked of Tredennis, as soon as they had exchanged greetings.

"I met Mr. Arbuthnot," Tredennis answered, "and stopped a few moments on the steps to talk to him."

"He has been entertaining me for the last hour," said the professor, taking off his glasses and beginning to polish them. "Now, will you tell me," he asked, with his quiet air of reflective inquiry into an interesting subject,—"will you tell me why he comes to entertain me?"

"He gave me the impression," answered Tredennis, "that his object in coming was that you might entertain him, and he added that you were very good to him, and he appeared to have enjoyed his call very much."

"That is his way," responded the professor, impartially. "And a most agreeable way it is. To be born with such a way as a natural heritage is to be a social millionnaire. And the worst of it is, that it may be a gift entirely apart from all morals and substantial virtues. Bertha has it. I don\'t know where she got it. Not from me, and not from her poor mother. I say it may be apart from all morals and substantial virtues. I don\'t say it always is. I haven\'t at all made up my mind what attributes go along with it in Arbuthnot\'s[Pg 164] case. I should like to decide. But it would be an agreeable way in a criminal of the deepest dye. It is certainly agreeable that he should in some subtle manner be able to place me in the picturesque attitude of a dignified and entertaining host. I didn\'t entertain him at all," he added, simply. "I sat and listened to him."

"He is frequently well worth listening to," commented Tredennis.

"He was well worth listening to this evening," said the professor. "And yet he was light enough. He had two or three English periodicals under his arm,—one of them was \'Punch,\'—and—and I found myself laughing quite heartily over it. And then there was something about a new comic opera, and he seemed to know the libretto by heart, and ran over an air or so on the piano. And he had been reading a new book, and was rather clever about it—in his way, of course, but still it was cleverness. And then he went to the piano again and sang a captivating little love-song very well, and, after it, got up and said good-night—and on the whole I regretted it. I liked his pictures, I liked his opera, I liked his talk of the book, and I liked his little love-song. And how should he know that an old dry-bones would like a tender little ballad and be touched by it, and pleased because his sentiment was discovered and pandered to? Oh, it is the old story. It\'s his way—it\'s the way."

"I am beginning to think," said Tredennis, slowly, "that \'his way\' might be called sympathy and good feeling and fine tact, if one wanted to be specially fair to him."

The professor looked up rather quickly.

"I thought you did not like him," he said.

Tredennis paused a moment, looking down at the carpet as if deliberating.

"I don\'t think I do," he said at length; "but it\'s no............