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272 like the warm individual atmosphere that is said to encompass us and contain the color of our personality.

Her eyes dwelt on his with a bright, soft inner look of happiness, but happiness aloof and far away from him. The impersonal, cold sweetness of her glance seemed to put him at a great distance, to herd him together with all the hundred other casual people that she knew and spoke to, and liked and forgot. Some mysterious influence had suddenly withered their friendship. Its richness and reality were gone, and as he met that sparkling, conscious, and yet distant glance, he realized that Letitia was no longer his friend, nor yet his enemy, but from henceforth would be the same Letitia to him that she was to his brother, that she had once been to Tod.

She was in love with Tod McCormick. It was incredible, inconceivable, but true. He saw it in the abashed and yet proud consciousness of her manner to him, in her averted eye, in the indefinable softening of her whole presence when the meager-visaged lad addressed her. Inside she glowed with the consciousness of the developing of her life; but her eyes only let a little of the inner light out in their shy shining. That was why they had lost their look of a dear, comfortable intimacy when they met his. Now they said that all that was over,