“Oh, do I?” she answered, rather inconsequently. Then she sighed, and bowed her fair head again. “Have you given it a thought at all--how lonely it will be after you are gone for--for those who are left behind? I can’t bear to think of it--I came in here because I couldn’t stand and see the horses at the door, and the preparations for your going. It is as if the tomb door were swinging back on me again. I am foolish, I know--” here the words were much hampered in their flow by incipient sobs--“but if you could realize my position--the awful desolation of it, the--the--” She broke down altogether, and, with the disengaged hand, put her handkerchief to her eyes. Seth had never seen a young and beautiful woman in tears before, off the stage, but his racial instincts served him in the emergency. He gently took her hand down again, holding them both, now, in his. He told her, again surprising himself by the smoothness and felicity of his words, how delightful she had made his visit, how deeply he prized her sympathy and compassionated her lot, and how the pangs of regret at parting were only solaced by the thought that she had permitted him to write. Then he kissed her--and hurried out to the carriage. The handsome, high-bitted grays made short work of the drive to Thessaly station, where John was waiting to have a parting word, so that Seth scarcely had time to collect his thoughts and settle accounts with himself, before the train started. Three hours later when he got off at Tecumseh, he had progressed no further in his work of striking a moral balance than: “After all, she is my cousin as well as my sister-in-law.” CHAPTER XVII.--AN UPWARD LEAP. WHAT man of achievement cannot recall some one short period of his life which seems to transcend in significance and value all the rest of his career--when great things for which he had only unconsciously waited came to him without the asking; when the high court of events rendered its sudden, unexpected verdict of success, without costs to him who had never made a plea; when the very stars in their courses seemed to have privily conspired to fight for him? How swift, inexplicable, even amazing it all was! And yet how simple too! And when the first flush of astonishment--half delight, half diffidence--had passed, how natural it all seemed; how mind and manners and methods all expanded to meet the new requirements; how calmly and as a matter of course the dignity was worn, the increment appropriated, the mental retina adapted to the widened focus! How easily, too, he sloughed off his own conviction that it was all pure luck, and accepted the world’s kind judgment of deserved success! Who is it that accuses the world, and rails at its hardness of heart? What man among us all, in the hour of honest introspection, does not know that he is rated too high, that he is in debt to the credulity, the generosity, the dear old human tendency to hero-worship, of his fellows?