Durant had a grievance against Miss Chatterton. He had been induced to lengthen his visit in order to entertain her, and Miss Chatterton refused to be entertained. His position at Coton Manor had thus become a humiliating sinecure. There was no earthly reason why he should stay any longer, and yet he stayed. The fact was, that by this time he was really interested in other things beside the landscape. He had wondered how long Miss Chatterton would keep it up. He watched her, as one haunted guest watches another, to know if she too has seen the specter of the house, observing her manner and her appetite at breakfast, the expression of her face at bedtime, her voice in saying good-morning and good-night. On the third day he thought he could detect a slight flagging; Miss Chatterton was a shade less buoyant, less talkative than before. By the evening she was positively serious, and he judged that the iron had entered into her soul. Her manner to her cousin had changed; it was more tentative, more tender, more maternal. She had begun to pity Frida, as he had pitied her. The two were inseparable; they were always putting their heads together, always exchanging confidences. And it was not only confidences but characters that they exchanged. It was a positive fact that as Miss Chatterton flagged Miss Tancred revived, she seemed to be actually growing young while the young girl grew older. Not that Miss Tancred grew young without difficulty; the life she had led was against that. She looked like a woman recovering from a severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse, she went about in a flush and fever of convalescence; it was a struggle for health under desperate conditions, the agony of a strong constitution still battling with the atmosphere that poisoned it, recovery simulating disease, disease counterfeiting recovery. A wholesome process, no doubt, but decidedly unpleasant to watch. Durant, however, had very little opportunity for watching it, as he was now left completely to himself. Miss Tancred's manner intimated that she had done with him,--put him away in some dark cupboard of the soul, like a once desired and now dreaded stimulant,--that she was trusting to other and safer means for building up her strength. If Durant had ever longed for solitude, he had more than enough of it now, and he devoted the rest of his time to finishing the studies and sketches he had begun. He had made none of Miss Tancred. One morning he had pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge on the far slope of the fir plantation. A thorn bush sheltered him from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace of grass above him. He had emerged from a fit of more than usual absorption when he felt the stir of footsteps in the grass, and a voice rang out clear from the terrace. "If it would only make papa happy. I want him to be happy." Durant could not help but overhear, his senses being sharpened by the dread of hearing.