perceived now that this enabled her to make light of a burden that might
otherwise have been intolerable. It qualified her to treat with
cheerfulness the grimness of her mother, which had certainly not grown
less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her
valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant
mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning,
whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady's condescension
would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was
perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley's favor was bestowed with a mental
reservation, and conditioned upon his forming no expectations from it,
and poor Glendenning's eagerness to show that he took it upon these
terms was amusing as well as touching. I do not know how to express that
Miss Bentley contrived to eliminate herself from the affair, or to have
the effect of doing that, and to abandon it to them. I can only say that
she left them to be civil to each other, and that, except when she
recurred to them in playful sarcasm from time to time, she devoted
herself to me.

Evidently, Mrs. Bentley was very much worse than she had been; her
breathing was painfully labored. But if her daughter had any anxiety
about her condition, she concealed it most effectually from us. I
decided that she had perhaps been asking the doctor as to certain
symptoms that had alarmed her, and it was in the rebound from her
anxiety that her spirits had risen to the height I saw. Glendenning
seized the moment of her absence after luncheon, when she helped her
mother up to her room, to impart to me that this was his conclusion too.
He said that he had not seen her so cheerful for a long time, and when I
praised her in every way he basked in my appreciation of her as if it
had all been flattery for himself. She came back directly, and then I
had a chance to see what she might have been under happier stars. She