Justin, preëminently clear-headed, had been conscious lately of two phases—one an almost preternatural illumination of intellect, and the other a sort of brain-inertia, more soul- and body-fatiguing than any pain. There were seasons when he was obliged to think when he could instead of when he would. He looked grave, alert, competent, but underneath this demeanor there went an unceasing effort of computation and reckoning to which the computation and reckoning on the first night of his agreement with Leverich was as a child’s play with toy bricks is to the building of an edifice of stone. The large responsibilities now incurred clashed grotesquely with the daily need of money at home for petty uses; a condition of affairs which often happens at the birth of a child, when the household is at loose ends, and the expenses are necessarily greater in every direction at the time when it seems most imperative to limit them. Justin seemed never to have enough “change” in his pockets, no matter how much he brought home. In some men the business faculties become more and more self-sufficing when there is no other passion to divide them—the nature grows all one way; and there are others who seem independent, yet who are always as dependent as children on the unnoticed, sustaining help of affection, the love that makes the home a refuge from the provoking of all men—that unreasonably, and at all times, hotly champions the cause of the beloved against the world. No help-giving virtue had gone out from this household in the last year; it had all been a dead lift. Justin had never spoken of his affairs to Lois since that Sunday when she had said that she hated them. When she had asked for money, she had always added the proviso, “if he could afford it,” and accepted the fact either way without comment. He was, as time went on, more and more affectionately solicitous for her welfare, even if he was, as she keenly felt, less personally loving. If she went to bed early in the evening, he took that opportunity to go out; and if she stayed up, he remained at home and went to sleep on the lounge; and the little touch that binds divergence with the inner thread of sympathy was lacking. Yet, strange as it might seem, while she consciously suffered far the most, his loss was mysteriously the greater; the fire of love of which she was by right high priestess still burned secretly for her tending as she cowered over the embers on the hearthstone, though he was cold and chill for lack of that vital warmth. There were moments when she felt that she could die gladly for him, but always for that glory of self-triumphing in the end. Then that which seemed as if it could never change began to change.