The Conwells came home from Europe the next summer, and we did not go
again to Gormanville. But from time to time we heard of the Bentleys,
and we heard to our great amaze that there was no change in the
situation, as concerned Miss Bentley and Glendenning. I think that later
it would have surprised us if we had learned that there was a change.
Their lives all seemed to have adjusted themselves to the conditions,
and we who were mere spectators came at last to feel nothing abnormal in
them.

Now and then we saw Glendenning, and now and then Miss Bentley came to
call upon Mrs. March, when she was in town. Her mother had given up her
Boston house, and they lived the whole year round at Gormanville, where
the air was good for Mrs. Bentley without her apparently being the
better for it; again, we heard in a roundabout way that their
circumstances were not so fortunate as they had been, and that they had
given up their Boston house partly from motives of economy.

There was no reason why our intimacy with the lovers' affairs should
continue, and it did not. Miss Bentley made mention of Glendenning, when
my wife saw her, with what Mrs. March decided to be an abiding fealty,
but without offer of confidence; and Glendenning, when we happened to
meet at rare intervals, did not invite me to more than formal inquiry
concerning the well-being of Mrs. Bentley and her daughter.

He was undoubtedly getting older, and he looked it. He was one of those
gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want
of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to
his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His
red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close all
round, it showed thinner on the crown than on the temples, and his pale