services at the Sunday-school, the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which Alick proposed and established.  He thought it all weariness to the flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way in the end.  He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had been right throughout.

But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the persistent sadness which was Alick’s chief characteristic now.  Gaunt and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed.  No one knew what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came near the truth.  Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and, the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.

For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in the neighborhood.  He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet not dangerous.  North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the true personality of madame.  In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular.  Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.

At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was expected home daily.  Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only Josephine understood the source.  But Josephine held her tongue, and received the confidence of her young friend with discretion.  As she had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide, and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with displeasure.  The constancy of the two, however, was very different in essential meaning.  With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios:  with Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision.  The one would have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined, a cripple, a criminal even:  the other would have shut out Edgar inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included the Hill.  With the one it was self-abasement—­with the other self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the men profited equally.