When she came back from Plattville, she went north, somewhere, to join people she had promised, I think." Meredith had as yet no inkling or suspicion that his adopted cousin had returned to Plattville.

What he told Harkless was what his aunt had told him, and he accepted it as the truth.
Mrs.Sherwood (for she was both Mr.and Mrs.Sherwood) had always considered Fisbee an enigmatic rascal, and she regarded Helen's defection to him in the light of a family scandal to be hushed up, as well as a scalding pain to be borne.

Some day the unkind girl-errant would "return to her wisdom and her duty"; meanwhile, the less known about it the better.
Meredith talked very little to Harkless of his cousin, beyond lightly commenting on the pleasure and oddity of their meeting, and telling him of her friendly anxiety about his recovery; he said she had perfect confidence from the first that he would recover.

Harkless had said a word or two in his delirium and a word or two out of it, and these, with once a sudden brow of suffering, and a difference Meredith felt in Helen's manner when they stood together by the sick man's bedside, had given the young man a strong impression, partly intuitive, that in spite of the short time the two had known each other, something had happened between them at Plattville, and he ventured a guess which was not far from the truth.

Altogether, the thing was fairly plain--a sad lover is not so hard to read--and Meredith was sorry, for they were the two people he liked best on earth.
The young man carried his gay presence daily to the hospital, where Harkless now lay in a pleasant room of his own, and he tried to keep his friend cheery, which was an easy matter on the surface, for the journalist turned ever a mask of jokes upon him; but it was not hard for one who liked him as Meredith did to see through to the melancholy underneath.