“Oh, there's a ship sailing from New York next week,” said Halleck, in the same tone of weary indifference. “I shall go in that.”
They talked desultorily of other things.
When they came to the foot of Clover Street, Halleck plucked his hand out of Atherton's arm. “I'm going up through here!” he said, with sullen obstinacy.
“Better not,” returned his friend, quietly.
“Will it hurt her if I stop to look at the outside of the house where she lives?”
“It will hurt you,” said Atherton.
“I don't wish to spare myself!” retorted Halleck. He shook off the touch that Atherton had laid upon his shoulder, and started up the hill; the other overtook him, and, like a man who has attempted to rule a drunkard by thwarting his freak, and then hopes to accomplish his end by humoring it, he passed his arm through Halleck's again, and went with him. But when they came to the house, Halleck did not stop; he did not even look at it; but Atherton felt the deep shudder that passed through him.
In the week that followed, they met daily, and Halleck's broken pride no longer stayed him from the shame of open self-pity and wavering purpose. Atherton found it easier to persuade the clinging reluctance of the father and mother, than to keep Halleck's resolution for him: Halleck could no longer keep it for himself. “Not much like the behavior of people we read of in similar circumstances,” he said once. “They never falter when they see the path of duty: they push forward without looking to either hand; or else,” he added, with a hollow laugh at his own satire, “they turn their backs on it,—like men! Well!”
He grew gaunt and visibly feeble. In this struggle the two men changed places. The plan for Halleck's flight was no longer his own, but Atherton's; and when he did not rebel against it, he only passively acquiesced. The decent pretence of ignorance on Atherton's part necessarily disappeared: in all but words the trouble stood openly confessed between them, and it came to Atherton's saying, in one of Halleck's lapses of purpose, from which it had required all the other's strength to lift him: “Don't come to me any more, Halleck, with the hope that I shall somehow justify your evil against your good. I pitied you at first; but I blame you now.”
“You're atrocious,” said Halleck, with a puzzled, baffled look. “What do you mean?”