"School-book style," said the girl. "That is my morning manner. In the evening I am quite different, thank goodness! But to go back--what I meant was that your own life must seem very strange to you. To have loved really--of course you did--why should you deny it? And then to have made the great mistake and to have married the wrong man, and to have been good and to have put up the shutters of propriety and virtue--so to say, and to have kept up a sort of Sunday-go-to-meeting myth for years, expecting to do it for the rest of your life, and then--to have the luck--well, no, I did not mean to put it that way--but to begin life all over again, and the man you loved not married yet, and just as anxious to marry you as ever--" "Stop, Dolly! How do you know?" Marion knit her brows in annoyance. "Oh! I know nothing, of course. I can only guess. But then, it is easy to guess, sometimes." "I am not so sure," answered Marion thoughtfully, and looking at Dolly with some curiosity. As for Brett, he said nothing to any one, when the news of John Darche's death reached New York. He supposed that people would take it for granted that in the course of time he would marry Marion, because the world knew that he had formerly loved her, and that she had made a mistake in not accepting him and would probably be quite willing to rectify it now that she was free. There had always been a certain amount of inoffensive chaff about his devotion to her interests. But he himself was very far from assuming that she would take him now. He knew her better than the world did, and understood the unexpected hesitations and revulsions of which she was capable, much better than the world could. He took a hopeful view, however, as was natural. For the present he waited and said nothing. If she chose to go through the form of mourning, he would go through the form of respecting it while it lasted. Society is the better for most of its conventionalities, a fact of which one may easily assure oneself by spending a little time in circles that make bold to laugh at appearances. A man may break the social barriers for a great object's sake, or out of true passion--as sheer necessity may force a man to sleep by the road side. But a man who habitually makes his bed in the gutter by choice is a madman, and one who thinks himself above manners and conventionalities is generally a fool. There is nothing more intolerable than eccentricity for its own sake, nor more pitiful than the perpetual acting of it to a gallery that will not applaud. For some time Brett continued to come and see Marion regularly, and she did not hesitate to show him that he was as welcome as ever. Then, without any apparent cause, his manner changed. He became much more grave than he had ever been before, and those who knew him well were struck by an alteration in his appearance, not easily defined at first, but soon visible to any one. He was growing pale and thin.