of one who has reduced life to a gesture, a manner.  “I wonder if he has ever really cared about anything—­even about me?” she questioned, after a minute; but while the thought was still in her mind, he mentioned his mother’s name, and it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow and his tenderness.  “I have seemed only half alive since I lost her,” he said; and the words were like a searchlight which flashed over his character and illumined its obscurities.  Did his whole attitude of immobility and negation result from the depth and the intensity of his feeling, from the exquisite reticence and sensitiveness of his soul?

“I know, I know,” she murmured in a voice of sympathy.  After all, she was not disappointed in him.  He was as tender, as chivalrous, as noble as she had believed him to be.  The Dream was true; and yet in spite of its truthfulness, it seemed to evaporate slowly while she sat there in Jane’s pink satin chair and looked out at the sunlight.  Only the restlessness, the inappeasable longing in her heart had not changed.  Looking across the hall into the library she could see the old French mirror reflecting the bronze candelabra, with crystal pendants, and the thought flitted into her brain:  “It is all real.  I am here, talking to Arthur.  It is every bit true.”  But her words failed to convince her, and she had a curious sensation of vagueness and thinness, as if their low, gentle voices were issuing from shadows.

“I should like to show you some of our improvements,” he said presently, with a faintly perceptible ripple of animation.  “I wonder if you would care to come out in my car?  We might go up Monument Avenue into the country.”

The idea was delightful, she told him with convincing enthusiasm; and while she ran upstairs to put on her hat, he went out to the car, which was standing in front of the house.  So preoccupied was he with his reflections, that when Gabriella appeared, he started almost as if he had forgotten that he was waiting for her.

The air was as soft and fragrant as summer; the grassy strip under the young maples was diapered with sunlight, and an edge of rosy gold was tinting the far horizon.  As they sped up the avenue Arthur pointed out the houses to her as possessively as Charley had done the afternoon before, and in the pride with which he told her the cost of them she recognized an admirable freedom from envy or bitterness.  If, he had not achieved things, his attitude seemed to say, it was because he had never been in the race, because he had preferred to stand aside and enjoy the reposeful entertainment of the spectator.

The avenue, which swept on indefinitely after the houses had stopped, dwindled at last to two straight and narrow walks binding the town to the country with bands of concrete.  The pines had fallen in blackened ruins, and where Gabriella remembered thickets of wildflowers there were masses of red clay furrowed by cart wheels.