"I cannot make out either," returned she. "Mr. Fenton used rather paradoxically to say that Mr. Strathmore was too frank by half to be honest."

She sighed as she spoke, and instantly all thought of bishops and church matters vanished from the mind of Ashe. He became entirely absorbed in wondering how warm was Mrs. Fenton's affection for her dead husband and in hating himself for the thought.

XV

HEARTSICK WITH THOUGHT
Two Gentlemen of Verona, i. I

Instead of returning to Boston next morning, Maurice remained at Brookfield for ten days. Mrs. Morison decided the matter, and it is not to be supposed that he was entirely unwilling to be constrained.

He naturally saw much of Berenice, and he passed hours in brooding over thoughts of her. He was convinced that she was not engaged. She had spoken of Stanford's visit, and it had seemed to Wynne that she had conveyed the impression that her relations to the visitor were less intimate than might at first sight appear. If she were free—the thought made his heart beat, and he wondered if, had the circumstances been different, he might himself have won her. He tormented himself with all her ways and words; the smiles she gave him, the trifling attentions which were addressed to the guest, but which seemed to have a touch of something deeper, that might be due to her thinking of him as her preserver, but which might even go beyond that. There was a delicious torture in all this reverie, in these continual self-reproaches which involved the thought of her, the remembrance of how she had looked, how she had spoken, how she had moved. He became every day more hopelessly her slave, yet every day insisting more strongly to himself that he felt nothing more than warm friend. Once for a moment he tried to believe that his feeling was merely a desire for her spiritual good, that his attitude was that which it was proper for a priest to feel toward a beautiful and frivolous worldling; but the pretense was too ghastly, and he abandoned it with a shudder of disgust. He had moments, too, when he said to himself frankly, in defiance or in sorrow as the mood might be, that he loved her; but for the most part he tried to keep the assumption of simple friendship between him and bitter thought.

He found great pleasure in Mrs. Morison. She was to him a revelation of possibilities of which he had never dreamed. It was a continual surprise to him to find himself so impressed by the wit, the wisdom, and the sanity of this fine old lady. He not only felt himself an ignorant and inexperienced boy beside her, but found himself shrinking from comparing with her the men whom he had followed as leaders. The ease of her manner, the completeness of her self-poise, her frank simplicity, high-bred and winning, delighted him, while the extent of her mental resources filled him with amazement.

Mrs. Morison opened to Wynne a new world in her conversation. At first she gave herself up chiefly to entertaining him, telling him delightful stories of famous folk she had known, of her life abroad and in Washington. She was full of charming little tales which she had the art of relating as if she were not thinking of how she was telling them, but as if they came to her mind and bubbled into talk spontaneously. She had a way, too, of putting in unobtrusive observations on character and events which impressed Maurice. The art of saying things trenchantly he had found in Mrs. Staggchase, but his cousin had the air of being aware of her cleverness, while Mrs. Morison said these things as if they were of the natural and habitual current of her thoughts. Mrs. Morison said clever things as if she thought them; Mrs. Staggchase as if she thought of them.

It did not take the young man long to discover that Mrs. Morison was not in sympathy with his creed. She was too well-bred to bring the matter forward, but he could not resist the temptation now and then to touch upon it. She was of principles at once so broad and so deep that he found himself as often surprised by her devoutness as he felt it his duty to be shocked by her liberality. One day when Maurice had made some allusion to a discussion over the doctrine of predestination which was agitating the English church, Mrs. Morison said:—

"It always seems to me a pity that those who believe in that dreadful doctrine do not remember that if one were not one of the elect, he could at least carry through eternity the realization that he was lost through no fault of his own. God could not take from him that consolation."