In the mean time he had seen that these Kentons were sweet, good people, as he phrased their quality to himself.  He had come to terms of impersonal confidence the night before with Boyne, who had consulted him upon many more problems and predicaments of life than could have yet beset any boy’s experience, probably with the wish to make provision for any possible contingency of the future.  The admirable principles which Boyne evolved for his guidance from their conversation were formulated with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling his laughter in his pillow.  He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable levity.  With his sense of being really very light at most times, and with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding to her frankness was concerned, been close.  He relished the unsparing honesty with which she had denounced him, and though he did not yet know his outcast condition with relation to her, he could not think of her without a smile of wholly disinterested liking.  He did not know, as a, man of earlier date would have known, all that the little button in the judge’s lapel meant; but he knew that it meant service in the civil war, a struggle which he vaguely and impersonally revered, though its details were of much the same dimness for him as those of the Revolution and the War of 1812.  The modest distrust which had grown upon the bold self-confidence of Kenton’s earlier manhood could not have been more tenderly and reverently imagined; and Breckon’s conjecture of things suffered for love’s sake against sense and conviction in him were his further tribute to a character which existed, of course, mainly in this conjecture.  It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the subjection to his wife’s, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless becomes, a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the actual performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in deference to the good woman.  She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her mother’s devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant barometer.  It had become apparent that Miss Kenton was her father’s favorite in a special sense, and that his partial affection for her was of much older date than her mother’s.  Not less charming than her fondness for her father was the openness with which she disabled his wisdom because of his partiality to her.

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