But when she left him he felt rather weak for a moment, as if his city malaria had returned upon him with a double force. As Elvira showed no signs of returning, he amused himself by turning over the leaves of the family photograph album. Face by face revealed the stern, set, arid, Puritan features, the hard, determined chins, and the “firmness,” which, in the person of the Hon. Ephraim, he felt still dominated and controlled the public affairs of East Village. He threw down the album with a feeling of impotent rage against the survival of this colonial “narrowness,” as he liked to call it. He walked out of the house and wandered, much crestfallen and full of malaria, along the village street toward the hotel. A great many farm wagons were tied along the sidewalk, and there were numbers of fresh-cheeked country girls walking in threes and fours, and sweeping the sidewalk as they went. Upon a slight elevation stood a white wooden meetinghouse, with a white steeple, and it gave him a chill even on that warm morning to look at it—it _looked_ so cold. Small groups of hard-featured farmers in fur caps stood on the corners of the streets discussing, presumably, the crops. He wondered if the fur caps were needed in that arid, bleak region to keep warm the natives’ sense of Right and Wrong? He made his way out, beneath some beautiful elms, into a small, old-fashioned burying-ground, where he discovered that “erring sinners” apparently comprised the only element of those who were requested to “_Pause and Read_.” Feeling himself to be now, for some reason, a distinctly immoral person, he read some of the quaint epitaphs, to which he was invited, in a spirit of humility, which presently changed to amusement. In death as in life, the hard, stern old village characters preserved on their headstones a fund of grim humor for the “sinner,” which in Archibald’s instance made him smile. “Oh,” he sighed to himself, “I long to take her away from all this sort of thing—forever!” He took a long walk in the afternoon, and returned to the hotel to find a coldly worded note from Elvira inviting him around to tea. He removed the stains of his walk, and dressed himself with his usual care. He found Elvira waiting for him beneath the high white pillars, in an unbecoming, and as it seemed to him, forbidding dress of black. Her face seemed unusually stern and relentless. There were traces of tears in her red eyelids, but the tears were dried away now, and her eyes were very bright and hard. “Don’t say anything _now_. Father feels very deeply about it. We have had a long talk. When he heard of the—of the unfortunate house affair—he was _so_ angry I could hardly pacify him.” Archibald’s heart sank within him. He fairly shivered. “He said that he did not want me to lower my standard,” continued Elvira, in her clear, musical, passionless voice. “And I told him that he need have no fears. I wanted to see you first, and tell you. Let us not have any _feeling_ about it.”