“Then do you think he is putting a great force on himself?”
“No, no,” said Hugh, in an odd, restless tone. “It’s just as it comes, I believe. But they say he bears it beautifully, because his spirits come back in and out. He is boyish enough still. I daresay in a year’s time it will all be pretty well over.”
“It strikes me, Hugh, you are more out of sorts than Arthur.”
“I?” said Hugh. “If Arthur feels one half—No, he could not choose to be always with me.”
Hugh knitted his brows and walked over to the window. His was the perplexity of an erring, earnest nature watching another live over a difficult piece of life, by means of a more gracious temperament, succeeding, as he felt, without the struggles that went towards his own failures. Arthur behaved much better to him than he did to Arthur, but he did not take half so much pains about it. This is always an unsatisfactory consciousness, and in Hugh’s case it was intensified by the morbid interest that he was forced to take in his cousin.
“Mother’s been telling me all the news,” said James, to change the subject.
Hugh understood his marked tone at once.
“Remember, Jem, that is closed for ever,” he said. “If you breathe one word of the past, in joke or earnest, to my mother or Arthur, it will be past forgiveness.”
“I’m sure I don’t want to stir it up,” said Jem; “but it is a strange turn of fate.”
“It will make no difference,” said Hugh, in a tone that meant “it shall not.”