Apollonius could not have avoided growing to be another man, even if he had not wanted to change; and he recognized clearly that it was a piece of good fortune that had led him to his cousin.  He lost more and more of his dreaminess; before long his cousin could put the most difficult task into the young man’s hands and he would complete it, without the aid of another’s advice, so satisfactorily that his cousin was obliged to confess to himself that even he would not have begun the matter more thoroughly, carried it on more energetically, finished it more speedily and happily.  Soon the youth was able to form his own opinion of the way in which the business at home had been carried on.  He was obliged to acknowledge that it had not been the most practical way, in fact, that some of his father’s orders could not but be called wrong-headed; then he reproached himself bitterly for his unfilial criticism, endeavored to justify his father’s actions to himself, and, if he found that impossible, forced himself to believe that the old man must have had his good reasons and it could only be that he himself was too limited in knowledge to be able to guess them.

Letters came from his brother.  In the first one he wrote that he was now clear in his mind about the girl to this extent, that her harshness toward Apollonius was due to her fondness for another whom he could not bring her to name.  In the next, one in which he scarcely spoke of the girl, Apollonius read between the lines a certain pity for himself, the reason for which he knew not how to find.  The third gave this reason only too clearly.  His brother himself was the object of the girl’s secret affection.  She had given him various signs of this, after he had renounced his former sweetheart in accordance with his father’s will.  He had suspected nothing of this; and when he had approached her as a suitor on his brother’s behalf, shame and the conviction that he himself did not love her had sealed her lips.

Now Apollonius realized with pain that he had been mistaken when he believed that those dumb signs had been meant for him.  He wondered that he had not seen that he was in error at the time.  Had not his brother been as near to her as he when she laid down the flower which the wrong man found?  And when she had met him alone so intentionally unintentionally—­indeed, when he called to mind the moments that dominated his dreams—­she had sought his brother, that was why she had been so startled to meet him, that was why she had fled every time as soon as she had recognized him, as soon as she found him whom she was not seeking.  She did not talk to him, but she could joke for a quarter of an hour at a time with his brother.

These thoughts characterized hours, days and weeks of pain that lay deep within him, but his cousin’s confidence which he had to reward by living up to it, the healing effect of busy and purposeful work, the manliness which both these things had already ripened in him, all held their own in the struggle and came out of it strengthened.