Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/198

188 in his escape from death, or only remembered it if a son or a friend begged to go on the same eventful climb. Then Edward was pointed out as a warning of its danger, and was begged to tell his story over again. How he shrank from the telling nobody knew, but the limpness and coldness of his replies soon froze the friendliness of those beside him. He was left to himself and silence. For some time Edward refused to believe that his friends shunned him. Yet their awkwardness in meeting him, their various excuses to get away, their refusal to walk with him for many inadequate reasons, his difficulty in keeping up conversation with them when he found them alone, his own very isolation amongst the strangers at the hotel, could not but open his eyes to the fact that, without a word of explanation, he was being put away from the friendships he desired, and from the affection that had been his.

The bitterest drop in this cup of bitterness was the coldness of the girl whom he had hoped to make his wife. He had known her a year, and had prevailed on her father—she was motherless—to join the trip that he and his