But is not this because he is then most opposed?  The stream may not flow any faster because it is dammed, but it exhibits at the obstructed points greater appearance of agitation.  Many people are under the impression that when they stop fighting there is a general truce:  There is reason to believe that the arch enemy is pleased with this impression, that he likes a truce, and that it is his best opportunity, just as the weeds in the garden, after a tempest, welcome the sun and the placidity of the elements.  It is well known that in summer virtue suffers from inertia, and that it is difficult to assemble the members of any vigilant organization, especially in cities, where the flag of the enemy is never lowered.  But wherever the devil is there is always a quorum present for business.  It is not his plan to seek an open fight, and many observers say that he gains more ground in summer than in any other season, and this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their tempers, and even become profane, in the aggravations of what is known as spring than at any other time.  The subject cannot be pursued here, but there is ground for supposing that the devil prefers a country where the temperature is high and pretty uniform.

At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not arrested by any geniality or languor of nature.  By midsummer the Hendersons were settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and Miss Tavish and her party of friends were at Bar Harbor.  Henderson was compelled to be in the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied that business required his presence there also; but he had bought a yacht, and contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up the Maine coast.  “No, I thank you,” Major Fairfax had said; “I know an easier way to get to Bar Harbor.”

Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the sort of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called, in an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer amusements of the relaxed city.  There was nothing unusual in this life except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was not strange in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker—­but everybody knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker if he keeps at it long enough—­there was nothing unusual in this, only it was giving Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the restraint of the Golden House down by the sea.  And he was more irritable there than elsewhere.  It is so difficult to estimate an interior deterioration of this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his comrades as ever, and apparently more prosperous.