"Alone."
Lottie threw her eyes upward. "What does he mean? What do you all mean by letting him get into such a rut? Such isolation; such loneliness! He needs to be cheered up, poor fellow. Dolly, I should think you would be frightened to death----"
"What could I possibly do that I haven't done?" demanded Dolly. "No one can do a thing with Robert when he is set. I have simply had to give up."
"You mustn't give up," protested Lottie courageously. "It is just the giving up that ruins everything. Personally, I am convinced that no one can long remain insensible to genuine and sincere sympathy. And certainly no one could accuse poor Robert of being unresponsive."
"Certainly not--if you couldn't," retorted Fritzie.
Lottie turned with amiability. "Now, Fritzie dear, you are not going to be unkind to me. I put myself entirely out of the case. It is something we ought all to work for together. It is our duty, I think."
She spoke very gently but paused to give the necessary force to her words. "Truly, it would be depressing to any one to come back to a gay circle and find it broken up in the way ours is. We can't help the past. Its sorrows belong to it alone. We must let the dead bury the dead and all work together to restore the old spirit when everybody was happy--don't you feel so, Arthur?" she asked, making that sudden kind of an appeal to Arthur De Castro to which it is difficult to refuse assent.
"Certainly we should. And I hope you will be successful, Lottie, in pulling things together."
"Robert is at home now, isn't he?"
"He has been at home a fortnight," returned Arthur, "but shut up with the new board of directors all the time. MacBirney walked the plank, you know, last fall when Nelson went on the board."