It was just after Helen went home that Lilian’s health began to fail—­to fail gently and slowly, but surely.  She shut herself up at first, and lay all day listless and melancholy.  She did not come down in the morning before John went out, but he usually found her on the sofa when he came in.  And there she stayed, either on the sofa or half lost among the cushions of an arm-chair, during the evenings when John’s friends came.  But by and by the house-friends one by one ceased to drop in as they passed down the hall; other friends ceased to ring the bell:  the old lively evenings were impossible with one so frail and delicate to be cared for.

Reyburn, to be sure, came every day, and no message could shut him out.  If Lilian was not in the parlors, he ran up stairs into the little sitting-room:  if he could not see Lilian, he would walk in and see her mother.  Sometimes John took her out to drive—­to give her a color, as he said—­but he was unable to do it often, and then Reyburn took his place till she declared she would ride no more.  It was not so easy to discover what ailed Lilian as it was to see she failed.  One doctor said she had merely functional derangement of the heart; another talked about complicated depression of the nerves; and a third said she was whimsical, and nothing at all was the matter with her, and she had better marry and taste the hard realities of life, and she would soon be cured of her follies.  But Lilian firmly and quietly refused to be married yet:  possibly she knew that her emotions were not what they should be for marriage with the man to whom she was plighted; possibly hoped that time might make it right; possibly wanted nothing more definite than delay.  Once John impressed Reyburn into his service in the matter:  they were so thoroughly intimate, so like brothers of one family, that he appealed to him without a second thought.  What Reyburn meant by urging her to fix the day for her wedding with John, Lilian might have marveled had he not kept his eyes on the floor while he spoke the few curt sentences, and held her hand with the grip of death.  It was no marriage with John that Reyburn wanted for her, she knew too well:  he also looked forward to delay.  But she told John that when she was herself again it would be time enough to talk of marriage:  she should not bind him to a dead woman.  And somehow, though the relation between her and John remained the same, the usual evidences of it, one by one, had disappeared.  If he took her in his arms, she slipped away; if he bent to kiss her lips, she held her cheek.  Still, though caresses ceased, the tender word and the kindly glance remained.  John fancied the rest to be but a part of the nervous whims of her illness, from which she was to recover in time; and he waited with all the old love in his soul.  And as for Lilian, the old affection was with her too—­the affection of childhood and girlhood, the deep and grateful feeling associated with all her life—­but it struggled