Nor was John in more reasonable case.  His mistaken Thought was different in action but equally successful in effect.  Born of an insistent desire, and nursed by half fearful hope, it stood a beggar at the door of life, snatching from every passing circumstance the crumbs by which it lived.  Did Desire smile—­how eagerly John’s famished Thought would claim it for his own.  Did she frown—­how quick it was to find some foreign cause for frowning.  And, as Desire woke to love under his eyes, how ceaselessly it worked to add belief to hope.  How plausibly it reasoned, how cleverly it justified!  That Spence loved his wife, the Thought would not accept as possible.  All John’s actual knowledge of the depth and steadfastness of his friend’s nature was pooh-poohed or ignored.  Benis, dear old chap, cared nothing for women.  Hadn’t he always shunned them in his quiet way?  And hadn’t he, John, warned Benis, anyway?  The Thought insisted upon the warning with virtuous emphasis.  It pointed out that Benis had laughed at the warning.  Even if—­but we need not follow John’s excursions further.  They all led through devious ways to the old, old justification of everything in love and war.

As time went on, the thing which fed the mistaken thoughts of both Benis and John was the change in desire herself.  That she was increasingly unhappy was evident to both.  And why should she be unhappy—­unless?

To John Rogers, that summer remained the most distracting summer of his life.  Desire should have seen this—­would have seen it had her mind-roads not been closed by their own obsession.  The probability is that she did not consciously think of John at all.  He was there and he was kind.  She saw nothing farther than that.

The relationship between the two men remained apparently the same and indeed it is likely that, in the main, their conception one of the other did not change.  To Benis, John’s virtues were still as real and admirable as ever.  To John, Benis was still a bit of a mystery and a bit of a hero>. (There were war stories which John knew but had never dared to tell, lest vengeance befall him.) But, these basic things aside, there were new points of view.  Seen as a possible mate for Desire, Benis found John most lamentably lacking.  Seen in the same light, Benis to John was undesirable in the extreme.  “If it could only be someone more subtle than John,” thought Benis.  And, “If only old Benis were a bit more stable,” thought John.  Both were insincere, since no possible combination of qualities would have satisfied either.

Of this fatally misled quartette, Mary Davis was perhaps the one most open to reason.  And yet not altogether so, for the thought of Benis Spence as eternally escaped was not a welcome one.  She realized now that she might have liked the elusive professor more than a little.  They would have been, she thought, admirably suited.  At the worst, neither would have bored the other.  And the Spence home was quite possible—­as