Putnam availed himself discreetly of the permission given. He came occasionally of an afternoon, and sat for an hour at a time. Usually she said little. Her silence appeared to proceed not from reserve, but from dejection. Sometimes she spoke of her brother. Putnam learned that he had been her only near relative. Their parents had died in her childhood, and she had come North with her brother when he entered the medical school. From something that she once said Putnam inferred that her brother had owned an annuity which died with him, and that she had been left with little or nothing. They had few acquaintances in the North, almost none in the city. An aunt in the South had offered her a home, and she was going there in the fall. She looked forward with dread to the time of her departure. "It will be so cruel," she said, "to leave my poor boy all alone here among strangers, and I never away from him before." "Don't think of it now," he answered, "and when you are gone I will come here often and see to everything." Her bereavement had evidently benumbed all her faculties and left her with a slight hold on life. She had no hopes or wishes for the future. In alluding to her brother she confused her tenses, speaking of him sometimes in the past, and sometimes in the present as of one still alive. Putnam felt that in a girl of her age this mood was too unnatural to last, and he reckoned not unreasonably on the reaction that must come when her youth began again to assert its rights. He was now thoroughly in love, and as he sat watching her beautiful abstracted face he found it hard to keep back some expression of tenderness. Often, too, it was difficult for him to tone down his spirits to the proper pitch of respectful sympathy with her grief. His existence was golden with new-found life and hope: into the shadow that covered hers he could not enter. He could only endeavor to draw her out into the sunshine once more. One day the two were sitting, as usual, in silence or speaking but rarely. It was a day in the very core of summer, and the life of Nature was at its flood. The shadows of the trees rested so heavy and motionless on the grass that they appeared to sink into it and weigh it down like palpable substances. "I feel," said Putnam suddenly, "as though I should live for ever." "Did you ever doubt it?" she asked. "Oh, I mean here--_ici bas_--in the body. I can't conceive of death or of a spiritual existence on such a day as this." "There is nothing here to live for," she said wearily. Presently she added, "This hot glare makes me sick: I wish those men would stop hammering on the bridge. I wish I could die and get away into the dark."