He had seen sufficient to satisfy him, and he went away muttering, “There isn’t enough of him to hate; he’s but the shadow of a man.  She fancy him!  I couldn’t have believed it; I can’t account for it, unless he’s very gifted in mind or very different when with her.  This must be true, and he would be a mummy indeed if she couldn’t wake him up.”

Roger rode home, however, ill at ease.  “He hasn’t forgotten her if he has given her up on account of her poverty,” he thought.  “He could see as well as I that there was no one there who could compare with her; but he mopes instead of trying to win her.  If he can dance, why can’t he work?  I’ve no reason to complain, however, and I thank my stars that I have muscle and a will.  In the meantime I shall come up here and study your tricks of manner, my elegant nonentity.  I believe in force.  Force moves the world and carries a man through it; but I now see that it should be well-managed and well-mannered force.  Miss Jocelyn compares me with you, and I seem to her uncouth, unfinished, and crude in the extreme.  Litheness and grace need not take an atom from my strength, and the time shall come when I will not fear comparisons.  I’ll win her yet with your own weapons.”

Roger’s dreams proved that his sympathies with the melancholy stranger were not very deep, and that his idea of the survival of the fittest was the survival of the strongest.  His human nature at that time was of the old Saxon type, that went directly for what it wanted, without much thought or sentiment for those weak enough to lose.

Although it was rather late before he reached home, he found his mother, Mrs. Jocelyn, and Mildred waiting for him in the sitting-room.

“What kept you so?” Mrs. Atwood exclaimed.

“I stopped a while at the hotel on my return,” he replied.

“Did my husband send any message?” Mrs. Jocelyn asked, with a solicitude she could not disguise.

“He told me to say that I had left him well, and safely on his way to the city.”

“Did—­did he seem well when you left him?” the anxious wife persisted.

“Quite as well as he did yesterday, I think,” was the reply.

“Mr. Atwood,” said Mildred, in a tone that startled him a little, and he saw she was looking at him as if she would read his thoughts, “did my father truly appear well when you parted from him?”

Roger’s eyes fell before hers, but he replied firmly, “I left him sitting quietly on the steamboat’s deck, and when I asked him if he had any message for his family, he said the words I have just repeated.  He seemed naturally depressed at leaving you all.  If he were not well he did not say anything about it;” and with a bow he passed up to his room.

“Mother,” said Mildred, when they were alone, “was it mere diffidence, or why was it, that he could not look me in the eyes?  I wonder if he is concealing anything.  It was in the afternoon and evening that papa was unlike himself yesterday.  I wish I really knew whether or not that young man is hiding anything, for I have an impression that he is.”