It was what he had taught her to expect of him, and he had himself to blame.  Now that he had thrown that precious chance away, he might well have overvalued it.  She had certain provincialisms which he could not ignore.  She did not know the right use of will and shall, and would and should, and she pronounced the letter ‘r’ with a hard mid-Western twist.  Her voice was weak and thin, and she could not govern it from being at times a gasp and at times a drawl.  She did not dress with the authority of women who know more of their clothes than the people they buy them of; she did not carry herself like a pretty girl; she had not the definite stamp of young-ladyism.  Yet she was undoubtedly a lady in every instinct; she wore with pensive grace the clothes which she had not subjected to her personal taste; and if she did not carry herself like a pretty girl, she had a beauty which touched and entreated.

More and more Breckon found himself studying her beauty—­her soft, brown brows, her gentle, dark eyes, a little sunken, and with the lids pinched by suffering; the cheeks somewhat thin, but not colorless; the long chin, the clear forehead, and the massed brown hair, that seemed too heavy for the drooping neck.  It was not the modern athletic type; it was rather of the earlier period, when beauty was associated with the fragility despised by a tanned and golfing generation.  Ellen Kenton’s wrists were thin, and her hands long and narrow.  As he looked at her across the racks during those two days of storm, he had sometimes the wish to take her long, narrow hands in his, and beg her to believe that he was worthier her serious friendship than he had shown himself.  What he was sure of at all times now was that he wished to know the secret of that patient pathos of hers.  She was not merely, or primarily, an invalid.  Her family had treated her as an invalid, but, except Lottie, whose rigor might have been meant sanatively, they treated her more with the tenderness people use with a wounded spirit; and Breckon fancied moments of something like humility in her, when she seemed to cower from his notice.  These were not so imaginable after her family took to their berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child might show at some incomprehensible harm.  It was this grief which he had refused not merely to know—­he still doubted his right to know it—­but to share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and had exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with the fair weather, he felt himself farther from her than before their acquaintance began.