“I had hoped you would grow stronger in the South,” he said, though all conversation seemed to him to have become suddenly the most impersonal thing on earth.

“But I am strong,” she answered, “I am never ill a day.”

“There’s something about you, all the same, that I don’t like,” he responded frankly.

“I know,” she nodded, smiling, “you aren’t used to seeing a dead person walk about.  But it’s very comfortable when you grow accustomed to it,” she added, with a laugh.

At this he would have brought a more intimate note into his voice, but she evaded his first hint of earnestness by a cynical little jest she had picked up from Gerty.  Her intention—­if she intended anything—­he saw clearly now was to confine her perceptions to the immediate surface of life presented before her eyes.  She spoke with animation of the country she had left, of Gerty’s gayeties, of the wonderful brightness of the weather; but when by a more serious question he sought to penetrate below this fluency of words, he was repelled again by the impression of a mere hollow amiability in her manner.  After a few casual remarks he left her with the most hopeless feeling he had known for months, and when, as the days went on, he endeavored fruitlessly to arouse in her a single sincere interest in human affairs, he found himself wondering if it were possible for any creature to be still alive and yet to resemble so closely a figure of marble.  Day after day he came only to yield at last to his baffled efforts; and the thin cold smile with which she responded to his words appeared to him sadder than any passionate outburst of tears.  Even Connie on that last afternoon had seemed to him more human and less unapproachable than Laura now.

Through the spring he saw her almost every day, and when in June he put her on the train with Gerty for the Adirondacks, he came away with the clutch, as if from a hand of ice, at his heart.  He had given her his best and yet he had not penetrated by word or look beneath the unnatural gentleness which enveloped her like an outer covering.  Then his heart hardened and he felt that he cursed Kemper for the thing which he had killed.

Back again in the forest, under the green and gold of the leaves, Laura asked herself why the associations of that last summer failed so strangely to disturb her as she looked on the familiar road and mountains?  A single year or a whole lifetime ago, it was all one to her now, and while she wandered along the paths down which she had walked with Kemper in the most blissful hours of her love, she found herself almost regretting that she had ceased to suffer—­that since her heart was broken it had lost even the power to throb.  In the city she had felt herself to be a part of the houses and the streets, and as perfectly indifferent to the passage of life as they; but here with her heart against Nature’s she would have liked to pulsate with the other live things in the