Perhaps our powers of endurance are never so near giving way as when we are holding them tightly strung, yet conscious of every jar and vibration in the effort; and poor Anthony, with his sensitive and affectionate temperament, went about with a dumb misery in his heart. He was rejecting friendship at the time he most needed it, and really longed to stretch out the hands with which he repelled its sweet kindness, in pitiful entreaty for some touch of fellowship which should break the cold isolation he was creating for himself. CHAPTER NINETEEN. "Those have most power to hurt us that we love; We lay our sleeping lives within their arms." Beaumont and Fletcher. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ There is a curious likeness in the yesterdays and to-days of our lives, a likeness so strong that it conceals the greater differences from us until we have gone far enough to look back and compare them dispassionately. We eat and drink, talk and sleep, more or less; certain things seem to hold us in chains to which we move obediently. If it were not so, life would be unendurable, the calls upon our sympathy would harden our hearts or wear them out, joy and sorrow would jostle each other too openly in the high road. The mechanism hurts us sometimes, but it is good discipline nevertheless. And so at Thorpe Regis the many changes were gradually covered with the old dress of routine and habit. It is almost sad how soon people become reconciled to them. A year ago it would have seemed the strangest thing in the world for anything to have broken through the daily intercourse between Hardlands and the Vicarage, and here was an alienation so great that it almost amounted to total estrangement. Not that the Squire desired it. Unused to keep a very close control over himself, he allowed his feelings to be seen, and affronted Anthony; but he would gladly have had everything as of old with Mrs Miles, and was too autocratic not to be puzzled when he found this not the case. "It was not her fault. The girls may go to her as much as they please. The poor woman's to be pitied,--I pity her from the bottom of my heart," he would say. Mrs Miles on her part had no very clear conception of what had happened, for she had lived in close retirement since her husband's death, and the few friends who entered that solitude were not likely to be cruelly communicative. But she was aware that unkind reports had been set afloat about the will, and, while really too sad and crushed in spirit to do more than reiterate her assurance that it would not have happened had the Vicar been alive, she was vaguely willing to take up cudgels against all the world on Anthony's behalf; in comparison with whom what was Hardlands, what was the Squire, what even were motherless Bessie and Winifred?