After two months of pilgrimages to places sacred to the memory of Polly Kirkland, Ainsley found that feeding his love on post-mortems was poor fare, and, in surrender, determined to evacuate New York.  Since her departure he had received from Miss Kirkland several letters, but they contained no hint of a change in her affections, and search them as he might, he could find no cipher or hidden message.  They were merely frank, friendly notes of travel; at first filled with gossip of the steamer, and later telling of excursions around Cairo.  If they held any touch of feeling they seemed to show that she was sorry for him, and as she could not regard him in any way more calculated to increase his discouragement, he, in utter hopelessness, retreated to the solitude of the farm.  In New York he left behind him two trunks filled with such garments as a man would need on board a steamer and in the early spring in Egypt.  They had been packed and in readiness since the day she sailed away, when she had told him of the possible sign.  But there had been no sign.  Nor did he longer believe in one.  So in the baggage-room of an hotel the trunks were abandoned, accumulating layers of dust and charges for storage.

At the farm the snow still lay in the crevices of the rocks and beneath the branches of the evergreens, but under the wet, dead leaves little flowers had begun to show their faces.  The “backbone of the winter was broken” and spring was in the air.  But as Ainsley was certain that his heart also was broken, the signs of spring did not console him.  At each week-end he filled the house with people, but they found him gloomy and he found them dull.  He liked better the solitude of the midweek days.  Then for hours he would tramp through the woods, pretending she was at his side, pretending he was helping her across the streams swollen with winter rains and melted snow.  On these excursions he cut down trees that hid a view he thought she would have liked, he cut paths over which she might have walked.  Or he sat idly in a flat-bottomed scow in the lake and made a pretence of fishing.  The loneliness of the lake and the isolation of the boat suited his humor.  He did not find it true that misery loves company.  At least to human beings he preferred his companions of Lone Lake—­the beaver building his home among the reeds, the kingfisher, the blue heron, the wild fowl that in their flight north rested for an hour or a day upon the peaceful waters.  He looked upon them as his guests, and when they spread their wings and left him again alone he felt he had been hardly used.

It was while he was sunk in this state of melancholy, and some months after Miss Kirkland had sailed to Egypt, that hope returned.