She schooled herself against further outcries, but the evidence
of her suffering was no less in her settled look of baffled expectancy,
her fits of mute abstraction, the start of her eyes at any sound of bell
or knock. She clutched back hope as it was slipping away, and would not
surrender uncertainty for its less harrowing follower, despair. She had
resumed, as the probability of immediate news decreased, her former way
of existence, living with her father at the house in lower Fifth Avenue,
where Miss Hill saw her every day except when she went to see Miss Hill,
who denied herself the Horse Show, the football games, and the opera for
the sake of her friend. Larcher called on the Kenbys twice or thrice a
week, sometimes with Edna, sometimes alone.
There was one possibility which Larcher never mentioned to Miss Kenby
in discussing the case. He feared it might fit too well her own secret
thought. That was the possibility of suicide. What could be more
consistent with Davenport's outspoken distaste for life, as he found it,
or with his listless endurance of it, than a voluntary departure from it?
He had never talked suicide, but this, in his state of mind, was rather
an argument in favor of his having acted it. No threatened men live
longer, as a class, than those who have themselves as threateners. It was
true, Larcher had seen in Davenport's copy of Keats, this passage marked:
"... for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death.
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