“That’s just the way I’ve been feeling,” Henry said, eagerly.  “What is it that you’ve been noticing?”

“I told you I am not sure that it is not all imagination, but—­”

“What?”

“Well, sometimes your wife has given me the impression that she was brooding over something that she was keeping entirely to herself.  She has had a look as if she had her eyes turned inward and was worrying over what she saw.  I don’t know that you understand what I mean by that?”

Henry nodded.  “That’s just the way Sylvia’s been looking to me.”

“I don’t know but she looks as well as ever.”

“She’s grown thin.”

“Maybe she has.  Sometimes I have thought that, but what I have noticed has been something intangible in her manner and expression, that I thought was there one minute and was not at all sure about the next.  I haven’t known whether the trouble, or difference, as perhaps I had better put it, was with her or myself.”

Henry nodded still more emphatically.  “That’s just the way it’s seemed to me, and we ’ain’t either of us imagined it.  It’s so,” said he.

“Have you any idea—­”

“No, I haven’t the least.  But my wife’s got something on her mind, and she’s had something on her mind for a long time.  It ain’t anything new.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I have asked her, and she says that of course she’s got something on her mind, that she ain’t a fool.  You can’t get around Sylvia.  She never would tell anything unless she wanted to.  She ain’t like most women.”

Just then Horace turned the corner of the street leading to his school, and the conversation ceased, with an enjoinder on his part to Henry not to be disturbed about it, as he did not think it could be anything serious.

Henry’s reply rang back as the two men went their different ways.  “I don’t suppose it can be anything serious,” he said, almost angrily.

Horace, however, was disposed to differ with him.  He argued that a woman of Sylvia Whitman’s type does not change her manner and grow introspective for nothing.  He was inclined to think there might be something rather serious at the bottom of it all.  His imagination, however, pictured some disease, which she was concealing from all about her, but which caused her never-ceasing anxiety and perhaps pain.

That night he looked critically at her and was rather confirmed in his opinion.  Sylvia had certainly grown thin, and the lines in her face had deepened into furrows.  She looked much older than she had done before she had received her inheritance.  At the same time she puzzled Horace by looking happier, albeit in a struggling sort of fashion.  Either Rose or the inheritance was the cause of the happiness.  Horace was inclined to think it was Rose, especially since she seemed to him more than ever the source of all happiness and further from his reach.