He was obliged to confess to himself that of late he found that the work which he had regarded as his object had ceased to satisfy him. He gave his attention to it with stern persistence, and refused to spare himself when he found his attention wandering; he even undertook additional labor, writing in his moments of leisure several notable articles upon various important questions of the day, and yet he had time left to hang heavily on his hands and fill him with weariness; and at last there came an evening when, after sitting in one of the parks until the lamps were lighted, he rose suddenly from his seat, and spoke as if to the silence and shadow about him. "Why should I try to hide the truth from myself?" he said. "It is too late for that. I may as well face it like a man, and bear it like one. Many a brave fellow has carried a bullet in his body down to his grave, and seldom winced. This is something like that, I suppose, only that pain"--And he drew a sharp, hard breath, and walked away down the deserted path without ending the sentence. He made a struggle after this to resist one poor temptation which beset him daily,--the temptation to pass through the street in which stood the familiar house, with its drawn blinds and closed doors. Sometimes, when he rose in the morning, he was so filled with an unreasoning yearning for a sight of its blankness that he was overwhelmed by it, and went out before he breakfasted. "It is weakness and self-indulgence," he would say; "but it is a very little thing, and it can hurt no one--it is only a little thing, after all." And he found a piteous pleasure--at which at first he tried to smile, but at which before long he ceased even to try to smile--in the slow walk down the street, on which he could see this window or that, and remember some day when he had caught a glimpse of Bertha through it, or some night he had spent in the room within when she had been gayer than usual, or quieter,--when she had given him some new wound, perhaps, or when she had half-healed an old one in some mood of relenting he had not understood. "There is no reason why I should understand any woman," was his simple thought. "And why should I understand her, unless she chose to let me? She is like no other woman." He was quite sure of this. In his thoughts of her he found every word and act of hers worth remembering and even repeating mentally again and again for the sake of the magnetic grace which belonged only to herself, and it never once occurred to him that his own deep sympathy and tender fancy might brighten all she did.