“What is the use of anger?” he asked himself, as he renewed the dying fire in his room.  “In view of all the past, she has more cause for resentment than I, while it is a matter of indifference to her whether I am angry or not.  I might as well be incensed at ice because it is cold, and she is ice to me.  She has her standard and a circle of friends who come up to it.  This I never have done and never can do.  Therefore she only tolerates me and is more than willing that I should disappear below her horizon finally.  I was a fool to speak the words I did to-night.  What can they mean to her when nothing is left for me, apparently, but a safe, luxurious life?  Such outbreaks can only seem hysterical or mere affectations, and there shall be no more of them, let the provocation be what it may.  Indeed, why should I inflict myself on her any more?  I cannot say that she has not a woman’s heart, but I wronged and chilled it from the first, and cannot now retrieve myself.  If I should go to her to-morrow, even in a private’s uniform, she would give me her hand cordially, but she compares me with hundreds of thousands who seem braver men than I. It is useless for me to suggest that I am doing more than those who go to fight.  Her thought would be:  ’I have all the friends I need among more knightly spirits who are not afraid to look brave enemies in the face, and without whom the North would be disgraced.  Let graybeards furnish the sinews of war; let young men give their blood if need be.  It is indeed strange that a man’s arm should be paralyzed, and his best hope in life blighted, by a mother!’”

If he could have known Marian’s thoughts and heard the conversation that ensued with her father, he would not have been so despondent.

When he left her so abruptly she again experienced the compunctions she had felt before.  Whether he deserved it or not she could not shut her eyes to the severity of the wound inflicted, or to his suffering.  In vain she tried to assure herself that he did deserve it.  Granting this, the thoughts asserted themselves:  “Why am I called upon to resent his course?  Having granted his request to visit me, I might, at least, be polite and affable on his own terms.  Because he wishes more, and perhaps hopes for more, this does not, as papa says, commit me in the least.  He may have some scruple in fighting openly against the land of his mother’s ancestry.  If that scruple has more weight with him than my friendly regard, that is his affair.  His words to-night indicated that he must be under some strong restraint.  O dear!  I wish I had never known him; he perplexes and worries me.  The course of my other friends is simple and straightforward as the light.  Why do I say other friends?  He’s not a friend at all, yet my thoughts return to him in a way that is annoying.”