Like many who live in the country and are much alone, she was given to fits of abstraction and long reveries. She had no idea how the time was passing, and meant to exert herself before the evening was over for the benefit of her father and guest. But her lively imagination could not endure interruption till it had completed some scenes connected with him she hoped so soon to see. Moreover, as we have said, the tendency to self-absorption had been developing rapidly. After the last rebuff, Gregory was very quiet, and soon rose and excused himself, saying that he had taken longer walks than usual and needed rest. Annie awakened, as if out of a dream, with a pang of self-reproach, and said, "I have been a wretched hostess this evening. I hope you will forgive me. The fact is, I've been talked out to-day." "And I had not the wit to entertain and interest you, so I need forgiveness more. Good-night." Mr. Walton looked up from his business papers and smiled genially over his spectacles and then was as absorbed as before. Annie sat down with a vague sense of discontent. With their guest, her dreams also had gone, and she became conscious that she had treated him with almost rude neglect, and that he had borne it in a spirit different from that which he usually showed. But she petulantly said to herself, "I can't always be exerting myself for him as if he were a sick child." But conscience replied, "You have so much to make you happy, and he so little! You are on the eve of a great joy, and you might have given him one more pleasant evening." But she met these accusations with a harshness all unlike herself. "It's his own fault that he is not happy. He had no business to spoil his life." "Yes," retorted conscience, "but you have promised and purposed to help him find the true life, and now you wish him out of the way, and have lost one of your best opportunities and perhaps your last; for he will not stay after Hunting comes;" and, self-condemned, she felt that she had spent a very selfish and profitless evening. For some reason she did not feel like staying to prayers with her father and Miss Eulie, who now came in, but, printing a hasty kiss on Mr. Walton's cheek, said, "Good-night. I'm tired, and going to bed." Even in her own room there was a malign influence at work that made her devotion formal and brief, and she went to sleep, "out of sorts." CHAPTER XXI PASSION AND PENITENCE The cloud on her brow had not disappeared on the ensuing morning when she came down to breakfast. Unless the causes are removed, the bad moods of one day are apt to follow us into the next. Annie was now entering upon one of those periods when, in accordance with a common expression, "everything goes wrong," and the world develops a sudden perverseness that distracts and irritates even the patient.