Miss Cotton rose in a bewilderment which did not permit her to go at once.  There was something in her mind which she wished to urge, but she could not make it out, though she fingered in vague generalities.  When she got a block away from the house it suddenly came to her.  Love!  If they loved each other, would not all be well with them?  She would have liked to run back and put that question to Mrs. Brinkley; but just then she met Brinkley lumbering heavily homeward; she heard his hard breathing from the exertion of bowing to her as he passed.

His wife met him in the hall, and went up to kiss him.  He smelt abominably of tobacco smoke.

“Hullo!” said her husband.  “What are you after?”

“Nothing,” said his wife, enjoying his joke.  “Come in here; I want to tell you how I have just sat upon Miss Cotton.”

XLVIII.

The relations between Dan and his father had always been kindly and trustful; they now became, in a degree that touched and flattered the young fellow, confidential.  With the rest of the family there soon ceased to be any reference to his engagement; his sisters were glad, each in her way, to have him back again; and, whatever they may have said between themselves, they said nothing to him about Alice.  His mother appeared to have finished with the matter the first night; she had her theory, and she did it justice; and when Mrs. Mavering had once done a thing justice, she did not bring it up again unless somebody disputed it.  But nobody had defended Mrs. Pasmer after Dan’s feeble protest in her behalf; Mrs. Mavering’s theory was accepted with obedience if not conviction; the whole affair dropped, except between Dan and his father.

Dan was certainly not so gay as he used to be; he was glad to find that he was not so gay.  There had been a sort of mercy in the suddenness of the shock; it benumbed him, and the real stress and pain came during the long weeks that followed, when nothing occurred to vary the situation in any manner; he did not hear a word about Alice from Boston, nor any rumour of her people.

At first he had intended to go back with Boardman and face it out; but there seemed no use in this, and when it came to the point he found it impossible.  Boardman went back alone, and he put Dan’s things together in his rooms at Boston and sent them to him, so that Dan remained at home.

He set about helping his father at the business with unaffected docility.  He tried not to pose, and he did his best to bear his loss and humiliation with manly fortitude.  But his whole life had not set so strongly in one direction that it could be sharply turned aside now, and not in moments of forgetfulness press against the barriers almost to bursting.  Now and then, when he came to himself from the wonted tendency, and remembered that Alice and he, who had been all in all to each other, were now nothing, the pain was so sharp, so astonishing, that he could not keep down a groan, which he then tried to turn off with a cough, or a snatch of song, or a whistle, looking wildly round to see if any one had noticed.