When his neighbors
thought differently, and avoided them, he saw no inconsistency in
bringing his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert
THEM. He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he had
of himself "backsliding." Narrow as was his creed, he had none of the
harshness nor pessimism of the bigot. With the keenest self-scrutiny,
his credulity regarding others was touching.
The storm was still raging when he alighted that evening from the up
coach at the trail nearest his house. Although incumbered with a
heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp without
begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had deprived him of
his horse. It was "like her" to do these things in her good-humored
abstraction, an abstraction, however, that sometimes worried him, from
the fear that it indicated some unhappiness with her present lot. He was
longing to rejoin her after his absence of three days, the longest time
they had been separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with
a certain lover-like excitement, quite new to his usually calm and
temperate blood.
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