"Oh, but one might also say 'Why?'" returned Richard. "We haven't any claim on you, really, and yet we do it, or, rather, I do it, which speaks all the more strongly for your generosity and trustworthiness."
"And you will be away"—Tredennis began.
"Two or three weeks. It might be more, but I think not. We separate here, I think, as I am going to drop in on Planefield. Good-night, and thanks."
"Good-night," responded Tredennis, and they shook hands and parted.
CHAPTER XV.
During the hot days and nights of the next few weeks Tredennis found life rather a dreary affair. Gradually the familiar faces he met on the avenue became fewer and fewer; the houses he knew one after another assumed their air of summer desertion, offering as their only evidences of life an occasional colored servant sunning him or herself on the steps; the crowds of nursery-maids, with their charges, thinned out in the parks, and the freshness of the leaves was lost under a coating of dust, while the countenances of those for whom there was no prospect of relief expressed either a languid sense of injury or the patience of despair.
"But, after all," Tredennis said, on two or three occasions, as he sat in one of the parks in the evening,—"after all, I suppose most of them have—an object," adding the last two words with a faint smile.
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.