But after a season the stream of events followed less clearly, and there were shades in his reveries.

Helena was a fragile woman, of little staying power, physically or morally, and since the time that he had originally known her--eight or ten years before--she had been severely tried.

She had loved herself out, in short, and was now occasionally given to moping.

Sometimes she spoke regretfully of the gentilities of her early life, and instead of comparing her present state with her condition as the wife of the unlucky Hall, she mused rather on what it had been before she took the first fatal step of clandestinely marrying him.

She did not care to please such people as those with whom she was thrown as a thriving farmer's wife.