“You talk of her as if she were the most shallow-brained of women,” he exclaimed, with his back to the family group, looking out with gloomy eyes into the old-fashioned street, the narrow circumscribed view which he had hated of late with a deadly hatred. “I don’t think she is very deep,” answered Sophia. “She never could appreciate Darwin. She told me once that she wondered what I could find to interest me in earthworms.” “A woman must, indeed, be shallow who feels no interest in that thrilling subject,” sneered Theodore. “Upon my word, now,” said his father, “Darwin’s book interested me, though I’m not a scientific man. And I never see a worm wriggling off the gardener’s spade without feeling that I ought to be grateful to him as a factor in the landed interest. Perhaps,” continued Mr. Dalbrook, musingly, “my own practice in the conveyancing line owes something of its substantial character to earthworms. If it were not for _them_ there might be no land to convey.” The conversation drifted lightly away from Juanita and her sorrow, but her image still filled Theodore’s mind, and he left the drawing-room and the frivolous talk and the clinking of teacups and teaspoons, and went out in the declining light to walk in the avenue of sycamores on the edge of the old city. He had not called upon his cousin in her new home; he shrank from the very idea of meeting her while her sorrow was still new, while her thoughts and feelings were concentrated upon that one subject, while he could only be to her as an unwelcome intruder from that outside world she loathed, as grief loathes all but its own sad memories. Had the calamity which had desolated her life brought her any nearer to him who had loved her so long and so unselfishly? Alas, no; he told himself that if she ever loved again, it would be to a stranger that her reawakening heart would open rather than to the rejected lover of the past, the man whom her memory would couple with the husband she had lost, and whom she would compare disadvantageously with that chosen one. No, he told himself, there was little more chance for him in the future than there had been in the past. She liked him and trusted him, with a sisterly affection which nothing short of a miracle could warm into love. Passion does not grow out of such placid beginnings.