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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41591 ***
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+  On page 16, "bran-new" may be a typo for "brand-new".
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: Constance Cary Harrison]
+
+
+
+
+     A Virginia Cousin
+     & Bar Harbor
+     Tales
+
+     _By_
+     Mrs Burton Harrison
+
+     M D CCC XCV
+
+     Lamson Wolffe and Co.
+     Boston and New York
+
+     Copyright, 1895,
+     By Lamson, Wolffe, & Co
+
+     All rights reserved
+
+
+
+
+Note by the Author
+
+
+The little story "A Virginia Cousin," here put into print for the
+first time, is in some sort a tribute offered by a long-exiled child
+of the South to her native soil. It is also a transcript of certain
+phases of that life in the metropolis which has been pooh-poohed by
+some critics as trivially undeserving of a chronicler, but fortunate
+hitherto in finding a few readers willing to concede as much humanity
+to the "heroine in satin" as to the "confidante in linen."
+
+Of the other contents of this volume, "Out of Season" made its first
+appearance some time ago in _Two Tales_, and "On Frenchman's Bay" was
+published in _The Cosmopolitan Magazine_.
+
+     C. C. H.
+
+     NEW YORK,
+     _November, 1895_
+
+
+
+
+A Virginia Cousin
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+Mr. Theodore Vance Townsend awoke to the light of a spring morning in
+New York, feeling at odds with the world. The cause for this state of
+variance with existing circumstances was not at sight apparent. He was
+young, good-looking, well-born, well-mannered, and, to support these
+claims to favorable consideration, had come into the fortunes of a
+father and two maiden aunts,--a piece of luck that had, however, not
+secured for him the unqualified approbation of his fellow-citizens.
+
+Joined to the fact that, upon first leaving college, some years
+before, he had led a few _cotillons_ at New York balls, his wealth and
+leisure had brought upon Townsend the reproach of the metropolitan
+press to the extent that nothing short of his committing suicide would
+have induced it to look upon anything he did as in earnest.
+
+With an inherited love of letters, he had dabbled in literature so far
+as to write and publish a book of verse, of fair merit, which,
+however, had been received with tumultuous rhapsodies of satire by the
+professional critics. The style and title of "Laureate of the 400,"
+applied in this connection, had indeed clung to him and made life
+hateful in his sight. To escape it and the other rubs of unoccupied
+solvency, he had made many journeys into foreign countries, had gone
+around the globe, and, in due course, had always come to the surface
+in New York again, with a sort of doglike attachment to the place of
+his birth that would not wear away.
+
+Of the society he was familiar with, Vance was profoundly weary. Of
+domestic ties, he had only a sister, married to a rich banker, and in
+possession of a fine new house, whose tapestries and electric lighting
+occupied all her thoughts and conversation that could be spared for
+things indoors. Away from home, Mrs. Clifton was continually on the
+wing, attending to the demands of philanthropy or charity, and to
+cultivation of the brain in classes of women of incomes equal to her
+own. Whenever her brother dined with her, she entertained him with a
+voluble flow of conversation about these women and their affairs,
+never failing, however, to exhibit her true sisterly feeling by
+telling Vance that she could not see why in the world he did not marry
+Kitty Ainger and settle down.
+
+By dint of much iteration, this suggestion of Kitty Ainger as a wife
+had come to take languid possession of the young man's brain. Besides,
+he liked Miss Ainger as well as admired her, and was perhaps more
+content in her company than in that of anybody else he knew.
+
+On the spring morning in question, he had awaked in a flood of
+sunshine and fresh air that poured through the open windows of his
+room. His cold bath, his simple breakfast, his ride in the Park,
+brought his sensations of physical well-being to a point that almost
+excited his spirits to strike a balance of youthful cheerfulness. He
+forgot his oppressive belongings, the obloquy they had conferred upon
+him in the minds of men who make public opinion about others as
+citizens, his unreasonable stagnation of ambition.
+
+As he cantered along the equestrian byways of the Park, and felt,
+without noting, the stir of new life in nature, he grew light of heart
+and buoyant. And as this condition increased, his thoughts
+crystallized around the image of Katherine Ainger. She, too, loved her
+morning ride; no doubt he should meet her presently. He had not seen
+her since Thursday of last week, when he had taken her in to dinner at
+Mrs. Cartwright's; and he had a vague idea she had resented him a
+little on that occasion. Her talk had been a trifle baffling, her eyes
+evasive. But she had worn a stunning gown, and was by all odds the
+best-looking woman of the lot. How well she sat at table, by the way!
+What an admirable figure for a man who would be forced to entertain,
+to place at the head of his board in perpetuity!
+
+Their families, too, had always known each other. And she was so
+uncommonly level-headed and sensible! Agreeable, too; no whims, no
+fancies. He had never heard of her being ill for a day. As to temper
+and disposition, they matched all the rest. She had never flirted;
+and, marrying at twenty-six a husband of twenty-nine, she would give
+him no possible anxiety on that score.
+
+Yes, his sister was right; everybody was right. Miss Ainger was the
+mate designed for him by heaven; and he had been a fool to dawdle so
+long in making up his mind to accept the fact.
+
+As the sunshine warmed him, and his horse forged along with a
+beautiful even stride beneath him, Vance worked up to a degree of
+enthusiasm he had not felt since he played on a winning football
+eleven in a college game. That very day he would seek her and ask her
+to be his wife. They would be married as soon as she was willing, and
+would go away in the yacht somewhere and learn to love each other. He
+would have an aim, a home, a stake in the community. At thirty years
+of age, he should be found no longer in dalliance with time to make it
+pass away.
+
+Vance, enamored of these visions, finished the circuit of the Park
+without seeing the central object of them, with whom he had resolved
+to make an appointment to receive him at home that afternoon. He rode
+back to the stable where he kept his horse, left it there, and,
+getting into an elevated car, went down-town to visit his lawyer,
+going with that gentleman afterwards into the stately halls of the
+Lawyers' Club for luncheon.
+
+At a table near him, Vance saw, sitting alone, a man named Crawford,
+whom he had met casually and knew for a hardworking and ambitious
+junior member of the New York bar. They exchanged nods, and Vance
+fancied that Crawford looked at him with a scrutiny more close than
+the occasion warranted.
+
+"You know Crawford, then?" said Mr. Gleason, an old friend of Vance's
+father. "He began work with our firm, but had an offer for a
+partnership in a year or two, and left us. He's a tremendous fellow to
+grind, but is beginning to reap the benefit of it in making a name for
+himself. If that fellow had a little capital, there is nothing he
+could not do, in this community. He has never been abroad, has had no
+pleasures of society, leads a scrupulously regular life, drinks no
+liquors or wines of any kind, and is in bed by twelve o'clock every
+night of his life. His only indulgence is to buy books, with which his
+lodgings overflow. We have always supposed him to be a woman-hater,
+until latterly, when straws seem to show that the wind blows for him
+from a point of sentiment. He was in the Adirondacks last summer, in
+camp with a friend, and I've an idea he met his fate then. After all,
+Vance, my dear boy, marriage is the goal man runs for, be he what he
+may. It will develop John Crawford, just as it would develop you, in
+the right direction; and I heartily wish you would tell me when you
+intend to succumb to the universal fate, and fall in love."
+
+"I heartily wish I could," said Vance, with a tinge of the mockery he
+had that morning put aside.
+
+At that moment, Crawford, who had finished his luncheon, passed their
+table, hat in hand, bowing and smiling as he did so. A waiter,
+jostling by, made him loosen his hold of the hat, a rather shabby
+light-brown Derby, that rolled under Vance Townsend's feet. It was
+lifted by Vance and restored to its owner before the waiter could
+reach the spot; and again Vance thought he detected a look of
+significance, incomprehensible to him, in the frank eyes Crawford
+turned upon him as he expressed his thanks.
+
+"It would have been a benefit to Crawford's friends to have
+accidentally put your foot through that hat," said Mr. Gleason,
+laughing. "He is accused by them of having worn it ever since he was
+admitted to the bar. But then, who thinks of clothes, with a real man
+inside of them? And no doubt the girl they say he is going to marry
+will right these trifling matters in short order."
+
+"I like Crawford; I must see more of him," replied Vance. "He strikes
+me as the fellow to pass a pleasant evening with. I wonder if he would
+come to dine with me."
+
+"If you bait your invitation with an offer to show your first
+editions, no doubt of it," said Mr. Gleason. "But to go back to our
+conversation, Vance. When are we to--"
+
+"I decline to answer," interrupted the young man, smiling,
+nevertheless, in such a way that Mr. Gleason built up a whole
+structure of probabilities upon that single smile.
+
+Yes, Vance decided, everything conspired to urge him toward his
+intended venture that afternoon. When, about four o'clock, he turned
+his steps in the direction of Miss Ainger's home, he had reached a
+pitch of very respectably loverlike anxiety. He even fancied the day
+had been unusually long. He caught himself speculating as to where she
+would be sitting in the drawing-room, how she would look when he laid
+his future in her hands.
+
+At that moment, he allowed himself to remember a series of occasions
+during the years of their friendship, upon any one of which he
+believed he might have spoken as he now meant to speak, and that she
+would have answered as he now expected her to answer. Ah! what had he
+not lost? In her gentle, equable companionship, he would have been a
+better, a higher, a less discontented fellow. All the virtues,
+charms, desirable qualities, of this fine and high-bred young woman,
+who had been more patient, more forgiving, than he deserved, were
+concentrated into one small space of thought, like the Lord's Prayer
+engraved upon a tiny coin. But even as his foot touched the lowest
+step of her father's portal, he experienced a shock of doubt of
+himself and of his own stability. He tarried; he turned away, and
+strolled, whither he knew not.
+
+In the adjoining street lived Mrs. Myrtle, an aunt of his, to whom, it
+must be said, Vance rarely paid the deference considered by that
+excellent lady her just due. She inhabited the brown-stone dwelling in
+which, as a bride, she had gone to housekeeping when New York society
+was still within limits of visitors on foot. Not that that made any
+difference to Mrs. Myrtle, who had always kept her carriage, and had,
+about twenty years back, been cited as a leader of the metropolitan
+_beau monde_.
+
+In those days, whether on wheels or a-foot, everybody went to Mrs.
+Myrtle's Thursdays. Her spacious drawing-rooms, papered in crimson
+flock paper, with their massive doors and mouldings and mirror-frames
+and curtain-tops of ebonized wood with gold scroll decorations, their
+furniture in the same wood, with red satin damask coverings, had, in
+their time, contained the elect of good society. The pictures upon
+Mrs. Myrtle's walls, and the statuary scattered on pedestals about the
+rooms, were then quoted by the newspapers, and by those so favored as
+to see them, as a rare display of the highest art, accumulated by an
+American householder. One of the earliest affronts of many
+unintentionally put upon his aunt by Vance had been his contemptuous
+shrug of the shoulders when called upon by her, shortly after his
+return from his first winter spent in Italy, to view her "statuary."
+
+Since then, Mrs. Myrtle had, little by little, come to a perception of
+the fact that her "art collection" was not, any more than its
+mistress, an object of the first importance to New York. But Vance had
+been always associated in her mind with the incipient stages of
+enlightenment, and she loved him accordingly. Her love for Vance's
+sister, Mrs. Clifton, who refused to pay her tribute, and belonged to
+the new "smart set," was even less.
+
+Upon Mrs. Myrtle, Vance now resolved to pay a long-deferred duty-call.
+Admitted by an old negro butler, he was left alone in the large
+darkling drawing-room, in the shade of the crimson curtains, amid the
+ghostly ranks of the statues, to ruminate until Mrs. Myrtle should
+make her appearance. Little thought did he bestow upon the duration of
+this ordeal. He was well occupied, and, for once in his life, heartily
+ashamed,----first, of his indecision upon the Ainger door-steps, and,
+secondly, of the fact that he had put in here to gain courage to
+return there.
+
+Mrs. Myrtle's heavy tread upon her own parquet floor aroused him from
+meditation. His aunt was a massive lady, who wore black velvet, with a
+neck-ruff of old point-lace; who, never pretty, and no longer pleasant
+to look upon, yet carried herself with a certain ease born of
+assurance in her own place in life, and cultivated by many years of
+receiving visitors. Her small white hand, twinkling with diamonds,
+was extended to him with something of the grand air he remembered his
+mother, who was the beauty of her family, to have possessed; and then
+Mrs. Myrtle, seating herself, fixed an unsmiling gaze upon her nephew.
+
+"I--ah--thought I would look in and see how you are getting on," he
+said, with an attempt at jocularity.
+
+"But it is not Thursday," she answered, cold as before. "I make it a
+point to see no one except on Thursday, or after five. And it is not
+yet after five."
+
+Townsend, who could not dispute this fact, was at a loss how to go on.
+But Mrs. Myrtle, having put things upon the right footing, launched at
+once into an exposition of her grievances against him, his sister, and
+the ruling society of latter-day New York.
+
+"I am sure if any one had told your mother and me, when we first came
+out, what people were to push _us_ against the wall, and to have all
+New York racing and tearing after their invitations, we should never
+have believed it. It's enough to make your poor mother come back from
+the dead, to revise Anita Clifton's visiting-list. And I suppose the
+next thing to hear of will be your marriage into one of these bran-new
+families. I must say, Theodore, although it is seldom my opinion is
+listened to, I _was_ pleased when I heard, the other day, that you
+were reported engaged to Katherine Ainger. The Aingers are of our own
+sort; and her fortune, although it is not so important to you, will be
+handsome. She is one of the few girls who go much into the world who
+still remember to come to see me; and she has been lunching here
+to-day."
+
+"Really?" said Vance, turning over his hat in what he felt to be a
+most perfunctory way.
+
+"Yes; if you or Anita Clifton had been here in the last two months,
+you might have found out that I have had a young lady--a Southern
+cousin--stopping in the house."
+
+"A cousin of mine?" queried the young man, indifferently.
+
+"My first cousin's daughter, Evelyn Carlyle. You know there was a
+break between the families about the beginning of the war, and, for
+one reason or another, we have hardly met since. When I went to the
+Hot Springs for my rheumatism last year,--you and Anita Clifton
+doubtless are not aware that I have been a great sufferer from
+rheumatism,--I stopped a night or two at Colonel Carlyle's house in
+Virginia, and took rather a fancy to this girl. I found out that she
+has a voice, and desired to cultivate it in New York, and so invited
+her to come on after Christmas and stay in my house."
+
+Vance was conscious of a slight feeling of somnolence. Really, he
+could not be expected to care for the Virginian cousin's voice. And
+Aunt Myrtle had such a soporific way of drawling out her sentences! He
+wished she would return to the subject of her luncheon-guest, and
+then, perhaps, he might manage to keep awake.
+
+"So you invited Miss Ainger to-day, to keep the young lady company?"
+he ventured to observe.
+
+"If you will give me time to explain, I will tell you that Katherine
+Ainger and she have struck up the greatest friendship this winter,
+and have been together part of every day. I wish, Vance, that you
+could bring yourself to extend some attention to your mother's first
+cousin's child. From Anita Clifton I expect nothing--absolutely
+nothing. Not belonging to the 'smart set,' whatever that may be, I
+make no demands upon Anita Clifton. But you, Vance, have not yet shown
+that you are absolutely heartless. When Eve goes home, as she soon
+will, it would be gratifying to have her able to say you had
+recognized her existence."
+
+"I will leave a card for the young lady in the hall," he said,
+awkwardly; "and perhaps she would allow me to order some flowers for
+her. Just now, Aunt Myrtle, I have an engagement, and I must really be
+going on."
+
+He had risen to his feet, and Mrs. Myrtle was about shaping a last
+arrow to aim at him, when the door opened, and a girl came into the
+room.
+
+"Oh! Cousin Augusta," she said, in the most outspoken manner, a
+slight Southern accent marking some of the syllables enunciated in a
+remarkably sweet voice, "I have been taking your Dandie Dinmont for a
+walk, and he has been such a good, obedient dear, you must give him
+two lumps of sugar when he comes to tea at five o'clock."
+
+As Mrs. Myrtle performed the ceremony of introduction between them,
+Vance became conscious that he was in the presence of one of the most
+radiantly pretty young persons who had ever crossed the line of his
+languid vision. Equipped in a tailor-made frock of gray serge, a black
+hat with many rampant plumes upon her red-brown hair, a boa of black
+ostrich feathers curling around her pearly throat and caressing the
+rosiest of cheeks, his Cousin Eve surveyed him with as much
+indifference as if he had been the veriest casual met in a crowd in
+Fifth Avenue. Two fingers of a tiny gloved hand were bestowed on him
+in recognition of their relationship, after which she resumed her
+interrupted talk about the dog.
+
+"You understand that Mr. Townsend is a relative, my dear?" asked Mrs.
+Myrtle, in her rocking-horse manner. "You have heard me speak of him?"
+
+"Yes; oh, yes, certainly," Eve said, with preoccupation. "But to us
+Virginians a cousin means either very much--or very, very little."
+
+"The presumption, then, is against me?" he asked, determined not to be
+subdued.
+
+"Is it? I had not thought," she answered, hardly looking in his
+direction. Vance took the hint and his departure. When again out of
+doors, he straightened himself, and walked with a firmer, more
+determined tread, conscious of a little tingling in his veins on the
+whole not disagreeable. In this mood, he reached the corner of the
+street in which dwelt Miss Ainger, and was very near indeed to passing
+it, but, recovering himself with a start, turned westward from the
+Avenue, and again sought the house from which he had gone irresolute a
+little while before.
+
+The door was opened for him by a servant, who did not know "for sure,"
+but "rather thought" Miss Ainger was in the drawing-room. While
+following the man across a wide hall, Vance espied, lying upon a
+chair, a man's hat--not the conventional high black hat of the
+afternoon caller, but a rusty brown "pot" hat, of an unobtrusive
+pattern.
+
+"Humph! the piano-tuner, no doubt," he said to himself, and
+simultaneously recalled the fact that he had seen the object in
+question, or its twin brother, that same day. Before the footman could
+put his hand upon the knob of the drawing-room door, it opened, and
+the owner of the hat came out. It was indeed Crawford, dressed in
+morning tweeds, as Vance had seen him at luncheon in the Lawyers'
+Club, his plain, strong face illuminated with an expression Vance knew
+nothing akin to, and therefore did not interpret.
+
+But Vance did know Miss Ainger for an independent in her set, a girl
+who struck out for herself to find clever and companionable people
+with whom to fraternize; and he was accordingly not surprised to meet
+Crawford here as a visitor. As once before that day, the two men
+exchanged silent nods, and parted. Vance found Miss Ainger caressing
+with dainty fingertips a large bunch of fresh violets that lay in her
+lap and filled the room with fragrance.
+
+Kitty Ainger, a daughter of New York, calm, reserved, temperamentally
+serious, fond of argument upon high themes, cultivated in minor points
+to a fastidious degree, handsome in a sculptural way, had always
+seemed to him lacking in the one grace of womanly tenderness he
+vaguely felt to be of vast moment in a young man's choice for a wife.
+
+To-day, as she greeted him, her manner was gentle and gracious to
+perfection. Perhaps it so appeared in contrast to that of the fair
+Phyllida who had flouted him in his Aunt Myrtle's drawing-room;
+perhaps Kitty was really glad of this first occasion in many days when
+they were alone together, undisturbed.
+
+The thought caused a wave of excitement to rise in the suitor's veins.
+He wondered how he could have held back, an hour before, when upon the
+threshold of such an opportunity. But then, had he made appearance, no
+doubt there would have been other visitors,--Crawford, for instance,
+whom Miss Ainger was plainly taking by the hand, to lead into society,
+as clever girls will do when they find an unknown clever man;
+Crawford, who did not know enough of conventionality to put on a black
+coat when he called on a girl in the afternoon; Crawford, poor and
+plain, a man's man, whom the Ainger family no doubt regarded as one of
+Kitty's freaks. Yes, Crawford would have been a decided interruption
+to this _tête-à-tête_.
+
+Now, there was an open sea before Vance, and he had only to launch the
+boat, so long delayed, a craft he at last candidly believed to be
+freighted with the best hopes of his life. They talked for awhile upon
+impersonal subjects--Kitty exerting herself, he could see, to be
+agreeable and sympathetic with her visitor. In the progress of this
+conversation, he took note with satisfaction of the artistic elegance
+of her dress (of the exact color of the Peach Blow Vase, he said to
+himself, searching for a simile in tint), with sleeves of sheenful
+velvet, and a silken train that lay upon the rug. Her long, white
+fingers, playing with the violets, wore no rings. Her slim figure,
+her braids of pale brown hair, her calm, gray eyes, attracted him as
+never before, with their girlish and yet womanly composure.
+
+"Why have you never told me," he said abruptly, "of your friendship
+with that little witch of a Virginia cousin of mine who has been
+staying with Mrs. Myrtle this winter?"
+
+"If you wish me to tell you the truth, it was because she asked me
+never to do so," replied Kitty, coloring a little. "You have met her?"
+she added eagerly.
+
+"Yes, to-day; a little while ago, when I called upon my aunt. But how
+could she know of me? What reason was there for her to avoid me?"
+
+"Evelyn is an impulsive creature," was the answer; and now the blood
+rushed into Kitty's cheek, and she was silent.
+
+"Impulsive, yes; but how could she resent a man she had never seen;
+who had not had the smallest opportunity to prove whether or not he
+was obnoxious to her? That is quite too ridiculous, I think. You, who
+have so much sense, character, judgment, why could not you exercise
+your influence over this very provincial little person, and teach her
+that a prejudice is, of all things, petty?"
+
+"She is not a provincial little person," said Kitty, with spirit. "And
+she does not merit that patronizing tone of yours."
+
+"If _you_ take her under your wing, she is perfection," he answered
+lightly, as if the subject were no longer of value for discussion.
+"But before we begin to differ about her, only tell me if it is my
+Aunt Myrtle's objection to me as a type that my truculent Cousin Eve
+has inherited?"
+
+"I hardly think so. Please ask me no questions," the girl said,
+uncomfortable with blushing.
+
+"As you like. It is veiled in mystery," he said, rather piqued. "At
+least, you won't mind informing me if she got any of her ideas of me
+from you. No, that is hardly fair. I will alter it. Did you and she
+ever speak of me together?"
+
+"What if I tell you yes, and that, every time we met?" exclaimed Miss
+Ainger, plucking up courage when thus driven into a corner.
+
+To her surprise and dismay, Vance took this admission quite otherwise
+than she had meant it. In Eve's attitude toward him, he thought he
+read a girlish jealousy of the object preoccupying the affections of
+her friend.
+
+"I see. I understand," he said, with a gleam in his eyes she had not
+seen there in all of their acquaintance. Until now, the hearth-rug had
+been between them. With an animation quite foreign to him, he crossed
+it, and leaned down to take her hands. At once, Kitty, withdrawing
+from his grasp, rose to her feet and faced him.
+
+"I think there is some great mistake," she said, very quietly. As
+Vance gazed at her, he became aware that he had until now never seen
+the true Kitty Ainger, and that her face was beautiful.
+
+"You repulse me? You have never cared for me?" he said, fiercely.
+
+A wave of color came upon her cheeks, and her eyes dropped before his
+to the violets in her hand.
+
+"I must tell you," she said, after a pause, during which both thought
+of many things stretching back through many years, "that I have just
+promised to marry Mr. Crawford."
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+The day of Miss Ainger's marriage with Crawford, which took place in
+New York, a month later than the events heretofore recorded, found
+Vance Townsend on horseback in Virginia, following, with no especial
+purpose, a highway that crosses the Blue Ridge Mountains to descend
+sharply into the valley of the Shenandoah.
+
+Before leaving home, he had acquitted himself of conventional duty to
+the bride by ordering to be sent to her the finest antique vase of his
+collection,--a gem of carved metal that Cellini might have
+signed,--filled with boughs of white lilac, his card and best wishes
+accompanying it. Then, with a heart overburdened, as he fancied, with
+regretful self-reproach, he had turned his back upon the chief
+might-have-been of his experience.
+
+Katherine, who had, in fact, passed many days in her paternal mansion
+unsought by him, was now invested with a veil of tender sentiment. In
+his waistcoat pocket he carried an unfinished poem, addressed to
+her,--or to an idealized version of Miss Ainger,--which, at intervals
+on his journey, he would take out and polish and shape with assiduity,
+forgetting sometimes to sigh over it in his zeal for metrical
+construction.
+
+The morning of the day that was to see the prize he had lost become
+definitely another's beheld Vance bargaining with a farmer--a former
+cavalryman in the Confederate service--to ride one of the two horses
+he had shipped by train from New York, and serve as guide in the
+war-harried region through which he desired to pass.
+
+The process was a simple one, the sum negligently offered for his
+services for a day sufficing to cover the expenses of ex-corporal
+Claggett for a fortnight, and leave a margin to fill his pipe with.
+Therefore, the rusty squire in attendance (to whom the treat of
+bestriding a steed like this would have been requital all-sufficient),
+the riders left the village that had sheltered Townsend for the
+night, and at once set out to ascend a long and toilsome hill, giving
+views on every side of an enchanting prospect.
+
+"I don't mean to appear boastful, suh," observed Mr. Claggett,
+modestly, "an' I ain't travelled much myself out o' this State, but
+I've heerd people say this 'ere view beats creation."
+
+"It is very fine, certainly, Claggett," replied Vance, halting to look
+back at the wide expanse of hill and valley mantled with springing
+green, the far-off, grassy heights serving as pasture for sheep and
+cows, and scattered with limestone boulders, against which redbud and
+dogwood in blossom made brilliant patches; with mountains beyond,
+above, everywhere, and all of that exquisite, velvet-textured shade of
+blue, so soft and melting it seems to invite caress.
+
+"By Jove! It is well named the Blue Ridge," Vance went on,
+approvingly.
+
+"Jest there, Mr. Townsend, in that very spot where the old red cow's
+a-munchin' in the grass, was where Pelham stood when his artillery let
+fly at them plucky Yankee cavalry that was behind the stone wall
+firin' like fury at our Confeds."
+
+"And who was Pelham?" asked the visitor, with interest.
+
+"Never heard o' Pelham? Well, I wouldn't 'a' thought it," was the
+compassionate answer. "Why, suh, he was a boy,--major of
+artillery--nuthin' but a boy,--an' they killed him early in the war.
+But he'd the skill an' the sense of an old general; an' there wornt no
+risk to himself he'd stop at in a fight. He'd just _swipe_ vict'ry,
+every time, suh, Pelham would; an' he was the pride an' idol of our
+army. Thar! them johnny-jump-ups are growin' where his gun stood, an'
+he rammin' charges into it with his own hand, when he sent that
+murderin' volley that made batterin'-rams out o' the stones o' the
+wall here, an' druv the poor Yankees behind it into Kingdom Come.
+Things look different to me, suh, now. I was a youngster, then, run
+mad to git into any kind o' fightin'; but I've got sons o' my own now,
+an' I can't somehow see the pints in all that killin' we did in our
+war, like I used to. But I can't think o' fellers like Pelham without
+wantin' to be in it again, suh.
+
+"Why, at Snicker's Gap (heard o' Snicker's Gap, Mr. Townsend?) that
+lad, who was commandin' Stuart's horse-artillery, charged on a
+squadron of cavalry that had been botherin' him with its
+sharp-shooters, and, with a gun that they'd dragged by hand through
+the undergrowth, fired a double charge of canister into their
+reserves. Then, suh, he charged agin,--a reg'lar thunderbolt that
+sally was,--picked up sev'ral prisoners an' horses, an', limberin' up
+his gun like wild-fire, hurried back to his first position, his men
+shoutin' for him all the while."
+
+"Those were stirring days for you, Claggett," said Townsend, whose
+blood began to answer to the man's enthusiasm.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Townsend, they were so; but you mustn't let me impose on you
+with my war stories. My present wife, suh,--a young lady I courted in
+King William, about the age of my oldest daughter,--she won't have me
+open my mouth 'bout war stories at our house. Says I tire everybody
+out with my old chestnuts, suh; an' perhaps I do. The ladies like to
+do a good deal of the talkin' themselves, I've noticed, Mr. Townsend."
+
+With a subdued sigh, Claggett subsided into silence, but not for long.
+The names of Stuart and Mosby and their officers were ever upon his
+lips, interspersed with anecdote and gossip concerning the country
+people whose dwellings were only occasionally seen from the road. Here
+and there, in the distance, chimneys behind clumps of trees were
+pointed out as belonging to old inhabitants who had held on to their
+homes through storm and stress of ill-fortune since the war.
+
+"Since you are from the Nawth, I would like to tell you, suh, that
+nobody who is anybody among our gentry ever lived in a village. They
+lived to themselves, suh, an' the further away from each other the
+better. If you had the time, suh, an' were acquainted with the
+families, I could show you some places that would surprise you. An'
+the ladies an' gentlemen, Mr. Townsend, of our best old stock are as
+fine people as any on God's earth, I reckon. Pity you ain't
+acquainted, as I said. It would give me pleasure to take you inside
+some of the gates of our foremost residents."
+
+Vance noted with amusement that Claggett did not assume to be on a
+social plane with the people he extolled, but had accepted the
+tradition of their superiority as part of the Virginian creed.
+Laughing, he joined in the honest fellow's regret at his ineligibility
+to take rank as a guest in the neighborhood.
+
+"Though it seems to me, Claggett, now that I think of it, I have a
+kinsman somewhere hereabout. Do you know anything of a family of
+Carlyles--Colonel Carlyle, I believe they call him?"
+
+Claggett's manner underwent instant transformation.
+
+"Colonel Guy Carlyle, of the Hall, suh?" he exclaimed, eagerly.
+"That's in the next county, a matter of twenty or thirty miles from
+here. I had the luck to serve under the Colonel, Mr. Townsend, and
+he'd know me if you spoke my name. You'll be goin' that way, suh?
+We'll strike north from Glenwood, and get there by supper-time."
+
+"Hold on, Claggett, you'll be pouring out my coffee and asking me to
+take more of the Colonel's waffles, presently. Colonel Carlyle married
+my mother's cousin, but I fancy would not recognize my name as quickly
+as yours. I have certainly no grounds for venturing to offer myself as
+an inmate of his house."
+
+"Beg your pardon, suh, but the Colonel'd never get over a relation
+ridin' so near the Hall an' not stoppin' there to sleep," persisted
+Claggett. "It's a thing nobody ever heard of, down this way."
+
+"I shall have to brave tradition, then," answered Vance,
+indifferently.
+
+"It's a fine old place, suh. House built by the Hessian prisoners in
+the Revolution, and splendid furniture. They do say there's one mirror
+in the big saloon that covers fourteen foot of wall, Mr. Townsend.
+Yanks bivouacked in that room, too, but didn't so much as crack it.
+An' chandeliers, all over danglers like earrings, suh. For all they
+ain't got such a sight o' money as they had, Miss Eve, she's got a
+real knack at fixin' up, an' she's travelled Nawth, an' got all the
+new ideas. You must 'a' met Miss Eve when she was Nawth, Mr. Townsend.
+Why, suh, she's the beauty o' three counties; nobody could pass _her_
+in a crowd, or out of it."
+
+"I _have_ met Miss Carlyle, Claggett," Vance said, growing
+uncomfortable at the recollection. "But only once, and for a moment.
+As you say, she is a beautiful young woman."
+
+"Then you _will_ stop at the Hall, suh?" pleaded his guide.
+
+"No," said Vance, briefly. "We will go on to Glenwood, and sleep there
+at the inn. To-morrow, you shall show me as much of the country as I
+have enjoyed to-day, but I am here for travelling, and not to
+cultivate acquaintance, understand."
+
+"Up yonder, on the hill-top, suh," observed Mr. Claggett, ignoring
+rebuke, "when we git through this little village we're comin' to (I
+was in a red-hot skirmish once, right in the middle of the street,
+ahead, suh), is a tree we call the Big Poplar. It marks the junction
+of three counties, an' 'twas there George Washin'ton slept, when he
+was on his surveyin' tour as a boy, suh--you've heard of General
+Washin'ton up your way, Mr. Townsend?"
+
+"Yes, confound you," said Vance, laughing at his sly look.
+
+"General Lee halted at that point to look at the country round, on his
+way to Gettysburg. A great friend of Colonel Carlyle was the General,
+suh; you'll see a fine picture of the General in the dinin'-room at
+the Hall. Colonel Carlyle lost two brothers followin' Lee into battle,
+suh, but we call that an honor down here. They do say little Miss Eve
+keeps the old swords and soldier caps of them two uncles in a sort o'
+altar in her chamber, suh. Heard the news that Miss Eve's engaged to
+her cousin, Mr. Ralph Corbin, in Wash'n't'n, suh? It's all over the
+country, I reckon. He's a young archytec', an' doin' well; but down
+here nobody knows if a young lady's engaged for sure, till the day's
+set for the weddin'."
+
+At this point Vance interrupted his garrulous guide to suggest that
+they should seek refreshment for man and beast in the hamlet close at
+hand; and the diversion this created turned Claggett from the
+apparently inexhaustible subject of the Carlyles.
+
+They rode onward, the genial sun, as it mounted higher in the heaven,
+serving to irradiate, not overheat, the beautiful earth.
+
+From this point the road went creeping up, by gentle degrees, to the
+summit of the mountain, beyond which Shenandoah cleft their way in
+twain. Traversing Ashby's Gap, the efflorescence of the woods, the
+music of many waters, the balm of purest air, confirmed Vance's
+satisfaction in his choice of an expedition. Descending the steep
+grade to the river, they crossed the classic stream upon the most
+primitive of flat ferry-boats, and on the further side passed almost
+at once into a rich, agricultural country, upon a well-kept turnpike,
+where the horses trotted rapidly ahead.
+
+Claggett, strange to say, did not resume allusions to the Carlyle
+family; but upon reaching a certain cross-road, he ventured an
+appealing glance at his employer.
+
+"Turn to the right here, to get a short cut to Carlyle Hall, suh."
+
+"Where does the left road take us?" asked Vance, shortly.
+
+"You _kin_ git to Glenwood that way, Mr. Townsend. But it's a
+roundabout way, an' a new road, an' a pretty bad one, an' it's just in
+the opposite direction from Colonel--"
+
+Vance answered him by riding to the left.
+
+A new road, with a vengeance, and one apparently bottomless, the
+horses at every step plunging deeper into clinging, red-clay mud; but
+the obstinacy of Vance kept him riding silently ahead, and the
+trooper, with a quizzical look upon his weather-beaten face, followed.
+Miles, traversed in this fashion, brought them into the vicinity of a
+small gathering of houses, at sight of which Vance spoke for the first
+time in an hour.
+
+"Claggett."
+
+"Yes, suh?" This, deferentially.
+
+"If I ever go back of my own free will over that infernal piece of
+road"--he paused for a sufficiently strong expression.
+
+"Yes, suh?" said Claggett, expectantly.
+
+"You may write me down an ass."
+
+"Yes, _suh_," Claggett exclaimed, with what Vance thought a trifle too
+much alacrity. "Better let me go befo' you for a little piece, Mr.
+Townsend," added the countryman. "Just where the road slopes down to
+the crick, here, it's sorter treacherous, if you don't know the best
+bit."
+
+Vance, choosing to be deaf, kept in front. He traversed the creek in
+safety; but, in ascending the other side, his horse plunged knee-deep
+into a quagmire,--throwing his rider, who arose none the worse except
+for a plaster of red mud,--and emerged evidently lamed.
+
+"He's all right, suh, excep' for a little strain," said the
+ex-trooper, after his experienced eye and hand had passed over
+Merrylad's injuries.
+
+"We will go at once to the hotel in the village, and get quarters for
+the night," said Vance, ruefully. "I've a change of clothes in that
+bag you carry, so I don't mind for myself. But I wouldn't have
+Merrylad the worse for this for anything."
+
+"The trouble is, Mr. Townsend," answered Claggett, "that you may get
+quarters fit for a horse here, but you won't be stoppin' yourself,
+I'll tell you."
+
+"Nonsense! Come along! You lead Merrylad; I'm glad to stretch my legs
+by a walk," and the young man started off at a good pace, plashing
+ever through liquid mire, that overflowed street and so-called
+sidewalk.
+
+There was no sign of an inn of any kind. A few dilapidated houses of
+the poorest straggled on either side the street, at the end of which
+they came upon a country store and post-office combined. Three or four
+mud-splashed horses hitched to a rock; as many mud-splashed loungers
+upon tilted chairs on the platform before the door. That was all.
+
+"Better take 'em on to old Josey's, Charley," called out a friendly
+voice to Claggett.
+
+"Yes, old Josey will do the correct thing by them," remarked a
+full-bearded, sunburned gentleman, who, seated astride of a mule, now
+came "clopping" toward them through the mud, from the opposite
+direction.
+
+"I am really afraid, Mr. Townsend," Claggett said, persuasively, "that
+we shall be forced to go on a mile or so further, to old Josey's."
+
+"And who in the thunder _is_ old Josey?" exclaimed Vance, testily.
+
+"Never heard o' him up Nawth, suh?" answered the trooper, with a
+twinkle in his eye. "He's the big person o' this part,--an old
+bachelor,--Mr. Joseph Lloyd, who runs the best farms and raises the
+best stock in the neighborhood. The truth is, not many visitors come
+here, unless they are booked for Mr. Lloyd's."
+
+"What claim have I on him, unless I can pay my night's lodging and
+yours? I will leave you and the lame horse here, and make my way back
+to-night to Glenwood."
+
+"To get to Glenwood, you'd have to pass over right smart of that mire
+we came through," said Claggett, pensively.
+
+"Then, in Heaven's name, let us go to Josey's," said Vance, laughing,
+in spite of his bad humor.
+
+They bade farewell to the village, and went off as they had come,
+Vance choosing to walk, the trooper leading the lame horse.
+
+And now, in defiance of his plight, his melancholy appearance, the
+accident to his favorite, Vance yielded himself to the spell of a
+region that became at every moment, as he advanced, more wildly
+beautiful. The sun, about to set, sent a flood of radiance over hills
+high and low, over a broken rolling country dominated by the massive
+shaft of Massanutton Mountain, rising like a tower above his lesser
+brethren. That the "mile or two further on" stretched into four or
+five, the young man cared not a jot. His lungs filling with crisp,
+invigorating air, he strode forward, and was almost sorry when the
+dormer-windows of an old house shrouded by locust-trees in bloom
+appeared upon a plateau across intervening fields.
+
+"Now for my best cheek!" he said to himself. "What _am_ I to say to
+old Josephus? Ask for lodging, like the tramp I look? Hang it! I
+believe I'll sleep under the nearest haystack, rather!"
+
+While thus absorbed, Mr. Theodore Vance Townsend, the fine flower of
+various clubs, did not perceive that he was an object of varying
+interest and solicitude to three persons looking over the fence of a
+pasture near-by, where cattle were enclosed.
+
+Two elderly gentlemen surveyed him closely. A girl, who had tossed a
+glance at him over her shoulder, seemed to find more attraction in the
+Alderney heifer, whose saucy rough tongue was at that moment stretched
+out to lick salt from a velvet palm, than in the mud-stained wayfarer.
+
+"That's no common tramp," said one of the gentlemen to the other. "If
+you will stay here with my Lady-love, I'll just go and investigate his
+case."
+
+Vance Townsend had, perhaps, like other mortals, known his "bad
+moments" in life. But he felt that there had been few like this, when
+the old gentleman, issuing through a gate opening from the pasture,
+came to him with a quick, decided step.
+
+The younger man took off his hat. The older did likewise. And then
+Vance, between a laugh and a groan, told his story, confirmed by the
+apparition at that moment, in the distance, of the horses and
+Claggett, who was himself afoot.
+
+"Say no more, my dear fellow, say not another word," interrupted the
+astonished old gentleman. "My name is Lloyd, and I'm the owner of that
+house behind the locusts, where I'm delighted to take you in, and
+Charley Claggett, too. We'll find out what's the matter with your
+horse, quick enough. Welcome to Wheatlands, sir, and just come along
+with me."
+
+Before Vance fairly knew how, he found himself in a "prophet's
+chamber," looking upon a sloping roof, where a martin was nesting
+within reach of his hand. Tapping the panes of the upper sash of his
+window, a branch tasselled with sweet-smelling blossoms swayed in the
+breeze. Outside, he had a wide and glorious view of field and
+mountains. Inside, he possessed a clean, if homely, bedroom, at the
+door of which a soft-voiced negro woman was already knocking, to ask
+for his bespattered garments.
+
+Vance was delighted. When he furthermore found left at his portal a
+tub with a large bucket of ice-cold water from the spring, together
+with his bag, he began to think that Virginia hospitality was not to
+be relegated among things traditional.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The soft Virginia dusk was closing upon the scene, when our young man,
+leaving his room, went down-stairs, through a hall hung with trophies
+and implements of sport, and out of an open door upon the "front
+porch," to look at the evening star hanging above the mountain crest.
+In this occupation he found another person indulging likewise, and in
+the clear gloom discovered the face and figure of a young and
+singularly graceful girl, who without hesitation accosted him.
+
+"Mr. Lloyd has told us of your mishap," she said, courteously. "He is
+congratulating himself that it happened near enough to let him help
+you out of it. I hope the horse will fare as well as the master."
+
+"Merrylad will be all right, thank you, so Claggett has been up to
+tell me. It appears that Mr. Lloyd, in addition to his other
+attractions, is a famous amateur vet."
+
+"You will find he has all the virtues," she said, laughing. At that
+moment, a lamp, lighted by the servant in the hall, sent a stream of
+illumination upon them. To Townsend's utter surprise, he saw the face
+of his cousin, Evelyn Carlyle.
+
+"You!" he heard her say, in a not too well pleased tone; and "You?" he
+repeated, with what he felt to be not a distinguished success.
+
+"How extraordinary that it should turn out to be you!" she began
+again, first of the two to recover her composure. "Did you think--were
+you, that is, on your way to visit _us_?"
+
+"Nothing was further from my thoughts," he answered, bluntly. "I, on
+the contrary, believed myself to be going in the opposite direction
+from where you live."
+
+"Of course," she said, somewhat piqued. "It is impossible you should
+have known that papa and I came yesterday on a visit to dear old
+Cousin Josephus. I beg your pardon if I was very rude."
+
+"It is certainly not a welcome that seems inspired by what I have been
+led to think is Virginia cordiality," he answered, coolly.
+
+"But I have asked your pardon, and that's not the way to answer me.
+You might grant it, never so stiffly; and after that, we, being thrown
+together this way through no fault of either of us, might agree to be
+decently civil before papa, who can have no idea how I feel toward--I
+mean what my reasons are for feeling--well, never mind what I mean,"
+she ended, vexed at his immobility.
+
+"I quite join with you in thinking it would be very silly to take any
+one else into this armed neutrality of ours. I shall at the earliest
+moment, to-morrow, relieve you of my presence. Suppose, until then,
+you try to treat me as you would another unoffending man under my
+circumstances."
+
+"Yes. You are right. It would be better, and it would not worry papa
+and Cousin Josephus," she said, reflectively. "Well, then, if you were
+another man, I should begin by asking you what brought you to
+Virginia. No; that would not be at all polite, would it? I think I
+shall just say nothing at all."
+
+"Not till you let me assure you that I came because a fellow I know
+told me he had made a driving tour in this part, last year, with his
+wife, and had found it rather nice--and another reason was, that I
+wanted to get away from myself."
+
+"You are very flattering to our State," she said, bridling her head
+after a fashion he found both comical and sweet. She was silent a
+little while, then resumed, more gently:
+
+"I was thinking of what you last said, and maybe I have done you an
+injustice. Maybe you are to be pitied more than blamed."
+
+"Do you mean because I spoiled a good suit of clothes and hurt my
+horse's leg?"
+
+"No; not that. You are clearly not in need of sympathy. There! They
+are going to ring the supper-bell, and you must go and be introduced
+to my father, as his cousin. He is the dearest daddy in the world, and
+will be sure to try to make you come to visit us at the Hall."
+
+"Am I to understand this is a hint not to accept?"
+
+"I _could_ stay on here, you know," she said, in a businesslike way.
+
+"You are perfectly exasperating," he exclaimed, and then the summons
+came to go into the house. Just before they crossed the threshold, she
+appeared to have undergone another change of mind. Turning back
+swiftly, in a voice of exceeding sweetness she breathed into his ear
+these words:
+
+"Please, I am sorry. I ought not to keep forgetting, ought I, that you
+are a stranger within our gates, and a cousin, really?"
+
+"Is she a coquette?" Vance began to ask himself, but was interrupted
+by a _sortie_ of his host in search of him.
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+Vance Townsend had reckoned without his host when he made the
+declaration that he would relieve Miss Carlyle of his presence the
+following day. The kind owner of Wheatlands, indulgent to every man
+and beast upon his premises, had yet a way of holding on to and
+controlling guests that none might resist.
+
+Vance, however, did not try very hard to resist the invitation to stay
+at least until "Thursday, when the Carlyles would be running away
+home." An evening spent with the kind, simple, yet cultivated people
+who formed the little _coterie_ at Wheatlands (there was among them a
+widowed cousin with her unruly boy, and a cousin who had been
+unfortunate in his investments) had, somehow, quite upset our hero's
+notions upon many points.
+
+Claggett, dismissed with a _douceur_, the liberality of which consoled
+that worthy countryman for an early reunion with the lady who would
+not allow him to tell stories of the war, took an affectionate leave
+of his employer. In his manner Vance detected more satisfaction in the
+vindication of Virginia customs than regret at the severance of their
+relation. The little triumph Claggett might readily have derived from
+the incident of the wayfarer's meeting, in spite of himself, with his
+relations was heroically suppressed. And before Townsend had turned
+upon his pillow the morning after his arrival, a telegram had gone to
+the town where his luggage had been left, ordering it to be sent by
+train that day.
+
+Vance had been told that breakfast would be at nine; and, awakened at
+half-past seven by a bird on the bough in his window, he abandoned
+himself to a lazy review of his impressions of the family. Of his
+Cousin Eve he had seen little more than what has already been told.
+After filling her place at a bounteous supper-table, where the talk
+was chiefly absorbed by the three gentlemen, she had vanished, in
+company with the widowed cousin, and was invisible thereafter--the men
+sitting together till midnight in the large, raftered hall, with a
+fire in its wide chimney, that served the old bachelor for a general
+living-room.
+
+Vance could not remember to have seen a face of finer lines, a manner
+of finer courtesy, than that of his seventy-year-old host, who, in
+spite of the rust of desuetude in worldly ways, carried his inbred
+gentility where all who approached him might profit by it.
+
+That he was a politician went without saying; and, indeed, the talk
+once directed in the channel of national government had kept there
+until they separated. On a claw-footed table holding a lamp beside Mr.
+Lloyd's easy chair, covered with frayed haircloth, Vance saw lying a
+crisp new Review of English publication, and all about were piled
+newspapers and magazines, while shelves displayed row upon row of the
+antique, tawny volumes that had made up the complete library of a
+country gentleman in the days of old Josephus's grandfather.
+
+Around the hearth, coming and going with every opening of many doors,
+gathered dogs of fine and varied breeds. One old patriarch of a St.
+Bernard, who attached himself particularly to the stranger, had
+remained close to Vance's feet, and gravely escorted him to bed.
+
+In his kinsman, Guy Carlyle, a handsome man of fifty odd years, who in
+a military youth had been noted for deeds of daring that rang through
+the army of Northern Virginia, but had long since resigned himself to
+the peaceful pursuits of agriculture, Vance saw the origin of Eve's
+rare beauty. He also became aware that, of a large family of sons and
+daughters born to the now widowed Colonel, Eve was the sole survivor;
+and it did not need the expression that irradiated her father's face
+when her name was touched upon to show in what estimation she was held
+by him.
+
+The tinge of melancholy in Mr. Carlyle's manner had, however, no
+effect like repression of the cordial friendliness he extended to the
+newcomer. Vance had gone to rest with a feeling that he had conferred
+a genuine favor upon his two elders by according to them, as he had,
+his company.
+
+Spite of these conditions of good-fellowship, he awoke next morning
+conscious that there was one under the roof with him who had the power
+(and no desire to withhold it) to make him far from comfortable; to
+puzzle him, to banter him, to pull him up with a jerk at the moment he
+might feel that he was getting reasonably ahead with her; to punish
+him, it would appear, for some offence he could not own to having
+committed.
+
+It was very clear that Eve thought him a poor fellow, mentally and
+morally; that, apart from her specific grudge against him, of nature
+unknown, she was not in the least inclined to pay tribute to his
+position, fashion, culture, wealth,--the appendages of Vance
+Townsend's personality people around him had always been disposed to
+make so much of. In the firmament of American society, he took himself
+to be a planet of first importance. In other lands, he had enjoyed
+more than a reasonable share of social success. Why should he here,
+for the first time in his life, feel like a man coming in fancy
+costume to a dinner where all the other guests wore plain clothes?
+
+It must be the doing of that girl. She it was who, with a few words, a
+cool glance or two that appeared to read his soul, had brought him
+into this strait; and Vance was still young enough to feel himself
+flame with resentment of her. Then fell upon his mental ear the soft
+cadence of her voice, asking his pardon for having possibly misjudged
+him, and his anger passed.
+
+As from Eve he went on to think of Kitty Ainger, now Mrs. Crawford,
+Vance was surprised at the freedom from soreness the reflection left
+upon his mind. Mrs. Crawford, he even reflected, was really an
+admirable woman--just the wife, as everybody had said, for a rising
+fellow like Crawford, who would surely reach the top! She had shown
+her good sense in taking him. Was it possible Vance had ever thought
+anything else?
+
+On a table near the bed lay the contents of a pocket emptied
+overnight--among them a folded paper, inscribed with the latest and
+most satisfactory draft of his verses to Kitty. This he now seized,
+and, upon re-reading it, a flush that was not of tender consciousness
+overspread his face. Regardless of the loss to the world of poetry,
+ignoring the recurrent efforts that Calliope had witnessed, he
+deliberately tore it up, and went to the open window prepared to
+scatter the tiny remnants upon a matin breeze.
+
+A view of wide green plains, with here and there a clump of noble
+trees, of soaring blue hills beyond them, all shining in the morning
+sun, met his eye; and almost directly beneath his window were a couple
+of horses, of which one was bestridden by old Josephus, in a nankeen
+coat and venerable Panama hat; the other, little more than a colt, was
+held by a negro and saddled for a woman's use.
+
+"Lady-love! Lady-love, I say!" called out the old gentleman, in a
+voice of Stentor.
+
+"Coming, coming, come!" gaily answered somebody; and in a moment
+Vance's Cousin Eve appeared.
+
+Springing lightly upon the segment of an enormous tree that served as
+horse-block, she dropped into her saddle, and devoted herself to
+subduing the juvenile remonstrance of her steed.
+
+With the fragments of his effusion to Kitty Ainger still in hand,
+Vance felt a curious sensation, as though the old world had suddenly
+become young and beautiful and tuneful; and then, from his ambush, he
+heard Josephus say:
+
+"I'd half a mind to rouse up our visitor, and take him with us to see
+the sheep in Six-Acre Lot. The ride before breakfast would have given
+him a good idea of the way my land lies."
+
+"O Cousin Josey, I am so thankful you did _not_!" answered Eve, with
+sincerity unmistakable.
+
+"Tut, tut, my dear child," began Mr. Lloyd, rebukingly; but Eve, who
+just then succeeded in starting her colt in the right direction, was
+off and away, sending back a trill of laughter to her ancient
+cavalier, who made good speed to follow her.
+
+The new conviction of his folly in having agreed to remain under the
+same shelter with Miss Carlyle did not prevent Mr. Townsend from
+making his appearance with an excellent appetite at the
+breakfast-table, whither he was duly escorted by Bravo, the old dog he
+had found outside his bedroom door waiting to take him in charge.
+
+With Bravo and another dog or two at heel, Vance had walked off his
+pique over dew-washed slopes of short, rich grass to a summit near the
+house, to be joined on the return by Colonel Carlyle, who had strolled
+out to meet him.
+
+Breakfasts at Wheatlands were justly considered the _chefs d'oeuvre_
+of old Josey's cook. Vance, helping himself to quickly succeeding
+dainties seen for the first time, cast a mental glance backward to the
+egg and a cup of tea that formed his accustomed meal at home. Half-way
+in the repast, Eve, who had been changing her habit to a pretty cotton
+gown, slipped into place between her father and the widow, who was
+pouring out the coffee.
+
+"What! What!" said Cousin Josey, detecting her absence from a seat at
+his side, that would have brought her face to face with Townsend. "My
+Lady-love desert me like that? Come back, little runaway, and see
+your Cousin Vance taste his first mouthful of a Wheatlands ham!"
+
+Thus adjured, Eve could but take the seat indicated; and Vance, who
+had determined to be no longer oppressed by so small and pink a
+person, bestowed on her an openly admiring glance that angered her
+anew.
+
+"We must leave you to Eve's mercies this morning, Mr. Townsend,"
+observed their host, at the conclusion of the repast. "Carlyle and I
+have promised to ride over to the County Court to hear a case tried,
+and to call on the Judge, who is an old college chum of the Colonel's.
+We shall be home to dinner at two, and you young people must entertain
+each other until then."
+
+"Could you not manage not to show so plainly what you feel?" asked
+Vance in his cousin's little ear, as they left the table. "Pray
+believe that I am not a party to the infliction put upon you."
+
+They had strolled bareheaded out under the trees shading the lawn
+about the house.
+
+"Shall we never have done quarrelling?" said Eve, wearily. "Just as I
+think I begin to feel kindly toward you, something happens, and I
+break down again."
+
+"Were we not moderately successful last night, when I assumed to be
+somebody else?" he asked.
+
+"Yes; that is better. I will treat you as I would any other man
+stopping here--any one not of your exalted class, I mean."
+
+"That was a quite unnecessary taunt. But I will allow it to pass if
+you agree for to-day--until the gentlemen return--to treat me as you
+would Mr. Ralph Corbin, for example."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked, quickly. "Ralph is the dearest, most
+obliging cousin I have, and I impose upon him dreadfully. If he were
+here, I should begin by sending him indoors to fetch my hat and
+parasol from the hall rack, and a new magazine I left in the
+window-seat, and tell him to call the dogs to come with us--What!
+_you_ can't intend to condescend to wait upon a mere girl, a country
+cousin?"
+
+He was off and back again with the articles demanded, showing no
+enmity in the smile offered with them to her acceptance. But he did
+not at once surrender the periodical, or until he had satisfied
+himself of the contents of the page held open by a marker of beaten
+silver.
+
+"You don't mind my looking at what you read?" he asked.
+
+"If you like. It is some verses--_not_ what _you_ would care for, in
+the least, but they have given me great pleasure."
+
+A glance showed him that his suspicion was correct. The stanzas in
+question had been written by him some months before, and sent,
+unsigned, to the editor.
+
+"Will you tell me what you fancy in these?" he said, with fine
+indifference of manner.
+
+"Why does one like a flower, or worship a star? They suit me, I
+suppose, and I am learning them by heart."
+
+His own heart throbbed with a schoolboy's glee and pride. But he said
+nothing, and walked beside her light figure, in the round of garden
+and orchard, bringing up in the stable-yard. Here, a space paved with
+grass-grown cobblestones was bounded on three sides by frame
+structures, now, in their decay, as gray and as fragile-looking as
+hornets' nests.
+
+"And the little house built of limestone, with one window, was put up
+in Colonial days, for refuge in case of an Indian raid. Mr. Lloyd will
+tell you one of his best stories, about an adventure of his ancestor
+in there, when three white men successfully resisted a band of
+red-skins. Perhaps our aboriginal anecdotes would bore you, however.
+If so, give us only a little hint, and we desist. Now, shan't we go in
+and see your horses?"
+
+She lifted the latch; Vance followed her, past stalls where the
+occupants gave her immediate recognition, to those in which his own
+pair were comfortably ensconced. Merrylad, ungallant fellow, would
+have none of the young lady, but at the touch and voice of his master,
+turned his beautiful head sidewise to lay it upon Vance's shoulder
+with affection.
+
+"I am, at last, an illustration of the legend, 'Some one to love me,'"
+he said, laughing. "So you thought I had forsaken you, old man? Not I,
+my beauty. Gently, gently, you are too demonstrative."
+
+"I can't imagine life without horses and dogs; can you?" she said,
+with the quickly growing comradeship of a child. "There; I was
+determined that Merrylad should let me stroke his neck!"
+
+From the stables, whose inmates seemed to have put them upon a better
+footing, they passed again under the pink-blossomed arcades of an
+apple-orchard, to pause beside a curious indentation, like a dimple,
+in the turf.
+
+"Just here," began Evelyn,--"but I shall not tell you, unless you
+promise to be properly impressed,--a sad fate overcame a dishonest
+negro servant of Mr. Lloyd's ancestor. He--the servant, I mean--was a
+fellow much given to acrobatic feats, and was accustomed to divert his
+master's guests by tumbling and turning cart-wheels. One day, he
+robbed old Mr. Lloyd's money-chest, and filling his pockets, went out
+in the orchard, and testified his glee by standing on his head."
+
+"What happened? Evidently something of a supernatural nature."
+
+"The earth opened, and out came a great hairy red hand," said Eve, "(I
+am telling it to you as my nurse told it to me) and 'cotched him by
+de hayde, and drawed him down.'"
+
+"What evidence do they offer of this event?"
+
+"That is the thrilling part. About fifty years ago, when the present
+owner was just of age, some men at work in this place dug up a
+treasure of golden 'cob-coins,' clipped here and there to regulate
+their value, as the custom was in olden days. And there, wedged in the
+earth where the gold lay scattered, was the skeleton of a man standing
+upon his head!"
+
+"Proof positive," said Vance, laughing.
+
+"I thought I should convince you. As an actual fact, the coins brought
+six hundred dollars at the Philadelphia mint, and the money was
+distributed among the finders."
+
+"Imagine how many darkeys have stolen out here, since, to work at
+night with pick and shovel! I suppose that accounts for the depression
+of the sod."
+
+"I myself found a George II. coin in the garden yesterday. See! If I
+were to give it to you, do you think it would bind you to continue to
+be 'some one else,' during the rest of your stay with us?"
+
+He took the bit of copper she held out, wondering, as he had done the
+night before, whether this kindly mood meant coquetry, then deciding
+it was but the frolic spirit of a wholesome and untrammelled youth not
+to be restrained. Whatever it meant, he would profit by it. A creature
+so bright, so impulsive as this, his new-found cousin, was not within
+his ken, even if the occasional prick of her wit did keep him in an
+attitude of self-defence.
+
+"Her cheeks are true apple-blossoms," he found himself murmuring,
+irrelevantly, as he pursued her through the tunnel of orchard boughs.
+"But her lips--what? Ah! bard beloved, I thank you--'Her mouth a
+crimson flower.' That's it. 'Her mouth a crimson flower.'"
+
+"What are you talking about, back there?" exclaimed his guide, turning
+sharply to call him to account.
+
+"Did I speak aloud? I was--ah--only wondering where we are going to
+bring up?"
+
+"Do I tire you? Perhaps you are not used to walking. Never mind; we
+shall soon reach the graveyard, and then you can sit upon the stone
+wall and rest."
+
+"I think I can last to the graveyard," meekly said the young man,
+whose tramps in the Alps and Dolomites and Rockies had included of
+"broken records" not a few.
+
+"Now, you are laughing at me," she said, suspiciously. "But you know I
+have never heard of you except as a lounger in clubs and a leader of
+_cotillons_."
+
+Vance thought it useless to protest.
+
+They now reached an enclosure under a grove of maples, where,
+motioning him to sit upon a low wall tapestried with moss and fern and
+creepers, she perched upon the gnarled root of a tree, and, opening
+her book, prepared to become absorbed in it.
+
+"Suppose you read aloud to me," he suggested, with cunning
+aforethought.
+
+"This?" she said, doubtfully, surveying his verses. "Oh, no; I think
+not. You would hardly care for _this_. It is something quite out of
+your line, don't you see? The writer gives expression to a perfectly
+straightforward, yet eloquent, expression of a true man's true
+feeling, about a thing of every day. It is not only that the words are
+lovely and the sentiment is noble, but the measure ripples like a
+stream--Why, what is the matter with you? One would think you know the
+author."
+
+"I am afraid, upon reflection, that I _do not_ know the author," he
+said, drawing back into his shell.
+
+"If you did, I should get you to thank him for me for this," she
+resumed. "They say authors are always disappointing to meet, after one
+has idealized them through their writings. But _he_ would not be. No;
+I would trust him, through everything, to be a noble gentleman. Of
+course he is unworldly. I believe he lives in a remote Territory, and
+despises petty conventionalities of society, especially those in New
+York. And I think he never even heard of that dreadful 400 of yours."
+
+Vance, smiling at her girlish nonsense, felt himself, nevertheless,
+lapped in the Elysium of her speech.
+
+Then her mood changed to pathos, as she told him the story of "Cousin
+Josey's" single episode of love, ending in the mound beside them,
+where slept the old man's bride-betrothed of seventeen,--a ward of his
+mother,--who had died of a tragic accident, forty years agone.
+
+"And every day, since, he has come here. See, there are fresh
+wood-violets upon her breast. And the dear old man has never thought
+of such a thing as giving her a successor. Now, let us go. There are
+lambs to show you, and a lot of other things."
+
+The passing cloud was gone from her April face. She was again radiant,
+and in some bedazzlement of mind he arose and followed her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Townsend's acquaintance with his Virginia cousins had, as might have
+been expected, prolonged itself into a visit to Carlyle Hall; and he
+was on the eve of departure, after a stay of two weeks in that
+delightful refuge, before he realized how much his fancy had begun to
+twine around the place and its inmates.
+
+Sentiment for the young creature who was its ruling spirit he did not
+admit, other than the natural tribute of his age and sex to hers. Nor
+did he give her credit for more than temporary feeling on any point
+disconnected with her strong local attachments. Her father, her home,
+and those she grandiosely called her "people"--meaning, he supposed,
+the individuals indebted to Providence for having been born within the
+limits of her State--were the objects of Eve's warm affection.
+
+Vance felt sure her courteous thought of him was the result of only
+transmitted consideration for a guest. So soon as he should quit the
+pleasant precincts of the Hall, he feared he must put aside his claim
+to even this consideration. This condition of affairs worried our
+young man more than he cared to admit to himself. To no one else would
+he have confessed that the fortnight had been spent by him in a daily
+effort to impress upon her a personality widely different from her
+conception of it. Now, at the end of his enterprise, he was conscious
+that he had not advanced in the endeavor; and this last evening in her
+company was correspondingly depressing to his _amour propre_.
+
+They were sitting together in a window-seat of the drawing-room,
+looking into an old-world garden with box walks, a sun-dial, and a
+blaze of tulips piercing the brown mold. From the western sky, facing
+them, the red light was vanishing, and in the large, dim room a couple
+of lamps made islands of radiance in a sea of shadows. In the library,
+adjoining, sat the Colonel, reading, his strong, handsome head seen in
+profile from where they were.
+
+Sounds of evening in the country, the sweet whistle of a negro in the
+distance, alone broke the spell of silence brooding over the old
+house. Vance hesitated to further disturb it, the more so that Evelyn
+had been in a mood of unusual graciousness. Nor did he, in truth, feel
+prepared to broach the discussion of certain things he had put off
+until now.
+
+"To-morrow," he said at last, with a genuine sigh, "I shall be on my
+way northward, and this beautiful, restful life will be among my
+has-beens."
+
+"Too restful, I'm afraid," she cried, in her brusque, schoolgirl
+fashion. "Your Aunt Myrtle always speaks of Virginia as nothing but a
+'cure,' which she is clearly glad to have accomplished and lived
+down."
+
+"It has been a cure for me in another sense. I wonder if you know what
+you have done for me?"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Don't fence with me now. For once, believe in your cousin, who
+is, after this, going to leave you for a long time in peace. Tell me;
+when I shall have gone, and that big, comfortable 'spare room' is put
+in order again for the next guest, shall you sometimes think of the
+subject of your missionary labors in the past two weeks?"
+
+"But I have never undertaken to reform you," she said, in a vexed
+tone. "It is absurd for you to think I imagined myself capable of
+that. The best I could hope for was that your visit should pass
+without our coming to open conflict. Papa could tell you I promised
+him to try that this should be so."
+
+"Then I am indebted to your father for the modicum of personal
+consideration you have vouchsafed me?"
+
+"And Cousin Josey--yes," she answered, with startling candor. "At the
+same time, I must say, I like you now better than I believed I ever
+could. It makes me wish with all my heart I could trust you."
+
+Vance felt a sting that was not all resentment, or all pain. The
+expression of her eyes, so fearless, so intense, waked in him a
+feeling that, in the moment they had reached, he desired nothing so
+much in all the world as to win this "mere girl's" approval. The color
+deepened in his face, as he said:
+
+"And yet you have given the author of those verses, who happens to be
+myself, credit for something in which you could place faith?"
+
+"You--_you_?" she exclaimed, starting violently. "Ah no! Don't destroy
+my ideals."
+
+"This may be wholesome, but it is certainly not pleasant," he said,
+praying Heaven for patience.
+
+There was nothing of her customary light spirit of bravado in the
+manner in which, after a pause, she next spoke to him.
+
+"I hardly know how--for the sake of others, I mean, not on my own
+account--to ask if it is possible you have not, in connection with me,
+given a thought to one who was my daily, intimate companion all of
+last winter."
+
+"That!" he interrupted, with a dry laugh. Why not arraign her for the
+wreck of me?"
+
+"You understand me, I see," she said, with meaning. "Let me say this,
+then: that I hold a trifler with women's hearts to be the most
+despicable of characters. A man who is too indolent or too infirm of
+purpose to deny himself the pleasure he gets from watching his
+progress in a girl's affections is an offender the law mayn't reach,
+but he deserves it should. That he makes his victim old before her
+time, in his gradual, refined disappointment of her hopes, may not
+count for much, in your estimation. But--but--oh! I could not have
+believed it of the person who wrote those verses!"
+
+There were tears in her honest eyes, a tremor in her young voice. Save
+for these, Vance, who had walked away from her a dozen steps, would
+have continued to put distance between himself and this "angel at the
+gate."
+
+As it was, he controlled himself sufficiently to return and say, in a
+hard, strained voice:
+
+"I shall not attempt to change your estimate of me. But I am glad you
+have given me an opportunity to tell you that on the day I saw you
+first, I went directly from my aunt's house to ask Katherine Ainger to
+be my wife. Some day, when you are older, and know more of the world,
+and take broader views of poor humanity, all these things may seem to
+you different. Then you may, perhaps, admit that, with all my faults,
+I could never be such a cad as you have pictured. In the little time
+that we are together now, please, let us say no more about it."
+
+He walked away, joining the Colonel, to engage that unsuspecting
+gentleman in an exhaustive discussion of politics.
+
+Eve sat for awhile in her dusky corner, absorbed in thought. She had
+decided to say a few words to him, before he should go, that might
+contribute to her relief rather than his. But Vance gave her no
+opportunity to speak any words to him, except those of conventional
+farewell. Betimes, next morning, he took leave of his cousins; and the
+Virginia episode was over.
+
+After he had left, Eve locked herself in her room, and gave way to a
+burst of tears.
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+In a railway carriage that had long before left Genoa with the
+ultimate intention of getting into Rome, a girl sat, tranced in
+satisfaction, looking from the window, throughout an afternoon of
+spring. To speed thus leisurely between succeeding pictures of a
+scenery and life she seemed to recognize from some prior state of
+existence--although now, in fact, seen for the first time--was a joy
+sufficient to annihilate fatigue.
+
+The milk-white oxen ploughing the red fields; the peasant women at
+work amid young vines; the sheets of wild flowers; the pink and white
+and blue-washed villas, with their terraces and palms and flower-pots;
+the hedges of roses, and groves of olive and eucalyptus; above all,
+the classic names of stations, albeit placarded in a commonplace
+way,--made Miss Evelyn Carlyle, lately a passenger of a steamer
+arriving at Genoa from America, turn and twist from side to side of
+the carriage, and flush and thrill with satisfaction, after a fashion
+causing her father, who accompanied her, to rejoice that they occupied
+their apartment undisturbed.
+
+As evening closed upon the scene, she at last consented to throw her
+head back upon the cushion of the seat, and admit she was a prey to
+the mortal consideration of exceeding hunger. Since leaving Genoa, a
+roll and some cakes of chocolate, only, had supplied the luncheon for
+a journey of ten hours. Therefore, when the train, stopping after dark
+at a little buffet, was promptly forsaken by its passengers, Eve and
+her father joined the eager throng craving refreshment at the hands of
+a perspiring landlord and his inefficient aids.
+
+"If I could only make these fellows understand, perhaps they would
+stop to listen," said Colonel Carlyle, growing wroth at the
+struggling, vociferating, jostling crowd massed in a small room,
+snatching for food like hungry dogs.
+
+"Allow me to--By Jove, it's the Colonel!" said a voice behind him,
+whose possessor was trying to pass on.
+
+"Ralph Corbin! Where did you drop from?" and, "Ralph, this is too
+delightful" were the greetings received by the young man thus
+unexpectedly encountered.
+
+"I am on my way from Nice to Rome to meet--er--some friends who are
+expected there for the Silver Wedding festivities," said he, with
+becoming blushes.
+
+"I know," exclaimed Evelyn, gleefully. "I was sure they had something
+to do with it."
+
+"But it's uncertain whether they have returned from Greece yet; and
+it's awfully jolly to meet you, anyway, Eve, and the Colonel. Here,
+let's get some food, and I'll go in your carriage for the rest of the
+way, of course. I'd not an idea you were coming out this year."
+
+"Nor we, until a fortnight since," said Eve.
+
+Ralph capturing a supply of bread, and fruit, and roast chicken, they
+made off with their booty to the train, and the evening passed in
+merry chat and explanation of their plans. Evelyn, however, by no
+means lost the consciousness of her advance for the first time upon
+Rome; and when, after crossing the Tiber at midnight, and catching
+glimpses, on either side the railway, of ruins that heralded their
+vicinity to the goal of her hopes, she was keyed to high excitement.
+
+Ralph laughed at her disappointment as the train ran slowly into a
+large, modern station lighted by electricity, and decorated with
+hangings of gold and crimson, a crimson carpet spread across the
+platform to one of the doors of exit. When they enquired of the
+_facchino_ who took their bags in charge, what great arrival was
+expected, the man answered with an indifference worthy of democratic
+New York: "It is for the Silver Wedding of their Majesties, Signor;
+but there are so many Kings and Emperors and Princes in Rome now, we
+have ceased to take account of them."
+
+"We have struck Rome at a crowded season," said Ralph, "and I don't
+know that you are going to like it overmuch. I say, Eve, if Somebody
+doesn't come for another week or so, what a heaven-send you and your
+father will be to me for company!"
+
+"That is the most cold-blooded way of making use of us to kill time
+with," said Eve; but she bestowed on him a well-pleased smile. To her,
+Ralph had been ever a chum,--a dear, good fellow, who was the best of
+company. His unexpected appearance here promised to add tenfold to her
+pleasure, while his hopes in the affair hinted at between them had
+been, for some time, familiar to her in detail.
+
+"And all this while I have never told you," he went on, in his boyish
+manner, "that at Nice I fell in with that swell New York cousin of
+yours, Vance Townsend. Not half a bad chap, if he is rather
+close-mouthed. Shouldn't wonder if he's in Rome, now, like everybody
+else in this part of the world."
+
+"Townsend?" said the Colonel, with animation. "Glad to hear there's a
+chance of seeing him. Just a year--isn't it, Eve?--since he visited us
+at the Hall. Well, there's no doubt we are in luck, if we meet Vance
+as well as you, Ralph."
+
+"The funny part of it is," whispered the joyous Ralph to Evelyn, "some
+of the people we both knew in Nice put it into Townsend's head I was
+coming here to meet my _fiancée_. And you know, Eve, I am not engaged
+to her yet; her mother put us on probation for six months. The six
+months are out next week, though, and I don't think it would hurt
+Maud's mamma to hurry herself a little bit to get here, do you? How
+you will admire Maud's style, Evie! Her hair is dark as--" etc., etc.,
+until Evelyn cut it short by jumping into the carriage drawn up in
+waiting for them.
+
+Just now, she was not as well prepared to listen as usual. Certain
+feelings she had believed extinct proved themselves to have been
+merely dormant. Even the spectacle of Rome _en fête_, by night, its
+bands and fountains playing, its streets still filled with lively
+promenaders, did not wholly distract her from this sudden tumult of an
+emotion she was not prepared to define.
+
+Constantly, during the crowded days that followed, while they drove
+hither and thither, attracted but provoked by the jumbling of ancient
+and modern in these haunts of history, she tried to persuade herself
+she was not ever on the alert to see somebody who did not appear. For,
+from among the many acquaintances and a few friends encountered in the
+streets of the sociable little city, Vance was persistently missing.
+
+Ralph, however, whose sweetheart also kept her distance, proved his
+philosophy by devoting his days to the Carlyles; and thus, under a sky
+blue as the fabled Elysian fields of Virgil, the festal week went on.
+Wherever their Majesties of Italy and Germany passed in public, they
+were greeted by thoroughfares black with people, windows and balconies
+blazing with flags and draperies, the clash of bands and the clank of
+soldiery.
+
+The coachman engaged for the service of our friends would contrive,
+wherever bound, to take on the way some passing show of sovereigns;
+and, upon a certain fair day, for no reason avowed, he drove them into
+the tangle of vehicles and people always seen surrounding the doors of
+the Quirinal Palace whenever there was a chance to catch glimpses of
+royalties upon the move. There ensconced, the saucy, bright-eyed
+fellow stood up, pretended his inability to get out of the snarl,
+gesticulated, talked to his friends and threatened his enemies in the
+crowd, while visibly rejoicing in the opportunity to see all likely to
+occur in that coveted quarter.
+
+"Look here, cabby, if you don't move out of this to the Baths of
+Caracalla in just two minutes and a half," began Ralph, at last, in
+emphatic English; but he had no reason to go on, as the driver, seeing
+the young man's face, gathered up the reins, and extricated himself
+with much dexterity from the crowd.
+
+Neither of his passengers noticed that a gentleman, in a carriage just
+then crossing theirs, looked at them, leaned forward, gave orders to
+his coachman, and at once proceeded to follow on their tracks.
+
+In the glorious ruin of the greatest of temples to athletic exercise,
+Evelyn drew a deep breath of delight. Nothing in Rome, not even the
+Colosseum, had so impressed her with the grandeur of bygone
+achievement in architecture as this wondrous pile, with its vast
+spaces, the gray walls breached by Time, out of which maidenhair grew
+and crows were flying--"crying to heaven for rain," as the guide
+poetically explained; the stately columns of red porphyry grouped
+around the beautiful mosaic floors; the lace-like traceries of carven
+stone; the niches and pedestals from which marvels of old sculpture
+had been removed; over all, the air that is gold and balm combined!
+
+Evelyn leaned against a column abstractedly, while Ralph and her
+father walked about, discussing with their guide facts and statistics
+of the Thermae. They had indeed strolled quite out of her sight, when
+a shadow on the pavement beside her caused her to look up. If an
+answer to thought be no surprise, then was not Evelyn surprised; for
+the person confronting her was Vance Townsend.
+
+"I have known that you were in Rome ever since the night you arrived,"
+he said, without preamble other than coldly offering her his hand. "I
+happened to be at the station to meet an English friend, when you
+came out; and I saw you get into your carriage and drive away."
+
+"Then you can hardly claim to have earned a welcome from us, now," she
+began to say, lightly, but found it impossible to go on, checked by
+the look upon his face.
+
+"I make no pretences," he said, bitterly. "If you care to know that I
+have either kept you in view every day since, or else have gone for
+long rides into the country, where I saw nobody, it is quite true. I
+have done everything foolish, everything foreign to my principles and
+habits, to satisfy, or to get away from, the feeling the sight of you
+aroused in me. I wonder what you'd think, if I told you I've been
+wandering about pretty much ever since I parted with you, a year ago,
+trying to get you out of my head. Many's the letter I've written to
+you and destroyed. Twice I set out to see you, and once I got back
+into the neighborhood of your home. When I saw you in the crowd at the
+station here, I actually thought I was possessed--" He checked
+himself. "I beg your pardon. I have no right to say these things to
+you, I know."
+
+"You? You?" she could only repeat, bewildered by the meaning in his
+tone and the expression of his eyes. "Is it possible that you--"
+
+"That I fell in love with you that time when you were holding me to
+account for a thousand transgressions, committed or not committed?
+Yes, it is quite possible. That need not prevent our remaining good
+friends, need it? I hope I've too much common sense to ask you to
+indulge in a discussion of these points, now; during the past week,
+I've been engaged continually, and I trust with some success, in
+disposing of the last remnant of hope I may have cherished that some
+day things might work around to give me at least a chance."
+
+"You make me very unhappy," she exclaimed.
+
+"That is far from my wish," he said, more gently. "Just at present you
+ought to be walking on roses. There! Your father and Corbin are coming
+back this way. I want to ask you to help me to excuse myself in your
+good father's sight, if I seem unsociable."
+
+"One word," she said, the blood flaming into her cheeks. "It is due
+you to know that long ago, soon after you left us, I received a letter
+from Katherine Crawford,--a letter that made me understand many things
+I had judged harshly in your conduct."
+
+"Mrs. Crawford has been always kind to me," he answered. "And no one
+rejoices more than I in her present happiness."
+
+"Yes, she is happy,--perfectly so,--and her life is full of the duties
+that best suit her. She says it was all planned out for her by
+Providence, and kept in reserve until she was fit for it."
+
+"So runs the world away!" he exclaimed, with a whimsical gesture.
+
+After that, the others came, and there was much talk of the subjects
+naturally presenting themselves. When they moved out of the enclosure
+to go to the carriage, Vance walked with the Colonel, following Evelyn
+and Ralph.
+
+"You will dine with us at our hotel this evening?" said the older man,
+at parting.
+
+"I am sorry that I am engaged," Vance answered, with appropriate
+courtesy, "and that to-morrow I am off for Sicily. Sometime, later on
+in your wanderings, I shall hope to run upon you again. This is the
+worst of pleasant meetings in travel, is it not?"
+
+When they were seated in the victoria, he shook Evelyn's hand last.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The day was finally at hand that was to bring Ralph's sweetheart--with
+her incidental father, mother, two younger sisters, and a
+governess--to the quarters engaged for them at Rome. In the young
+man's enthusiasm, he did not forget to wonder what cloud had passed
+over his Cousin Evelyn's enjoyment of the place, the sights, the
+season. He even consulted the Colonel as to whether Eve might not be
+unduly affected by the crowded condition of the town, and proposed for
+them to change to a quieter spot. And Eve's father, who had had his
+own anxieties on this point, prevailed upon her to give up the
+engagements she had made with apparent zest, and resort to Naples and
+Sorrento.
+
+To Naples, accordingly, they went, the faithful Ralph accompanying
+them, at the cost of a night-journey on his return to Rome for the day
+that was to see his happiness in flower. He drove with them to their
+hotel, through the interminable streets, lined with palaces and
+thronged with paupers, and saw them ensconced in pleasant quarters
+facing Vesuvius, whose feather of smoke pointed to good weather. They
+dined together in a vast _salle-à-manger_, where, in a gallery, was
+conducted during their repast a noisy and mirth-provoking concert of
+fiddlers, mandolins, and guitars,--the performers singing, shouting,
+dancing, as they played. There was an hour before his train left, in
+which, while the Colonel smoked upon the balcony of their
+sitting-room, Eve walked out upon one of the quays with her cousin;
+and this hour Ralph determined to improve.
+
+In the last day or two, trifles had shown this astute young man that
+the depression of his cousin (for whom he cherished no grudge
+because, a year or two before, he had been wild to call her wife, and
+she would not hear of it) had been coincident with the meeting in Rome
+with Townsend. That very morning, he had found at his bankers', had
+read and put into his pocket, a letter written by Vance on arriving at
+Taormina, which had thrown upon the subject a new and surprising
+light. Just how to convey his discoveries to Evelyn, the most proud
+and sensitive of creatures about her sacred feelings, he had not yet
+decided.
+
+They talked of the bay, of the mountains, of Vesuvius. Calmed and
+enchanted by the hour and scene, Eve wore her gentlest aspect, and
+Ralph felt emboldened to begin.
+
+"This is as it should be," he said, with an air of generalizing. "You
+will go to Sorrento and Amalfi and Capri, and your roses will come
+back. I shall not forget you, Evie dear, because I am getting what I
+most want in life. You have always been to me a thing apart, and I've
+told Maud so, over and over again. By and by, I shall bring her to the
+Hall, and let her see you at your best, as its mistress. For you are
+not quite the same over here, Evie, as in Virginia air."
+
+"Perhaps I am growing old," she said, smiling. "But never mind me. We
+shall miss you, Ralph, and it will require the greatest heroism to do
+without you. After this journey, nobody need tell me that 'three is
+trumpery.' We know better, do we not?"
+
+"Why not send for your other cousin to take my place?" said Ralph,
+seeing his opportunity. "He is at Taormina, and would come,
+undoubtedly. I had a letter from him this morning, by the way. The
+most characteristic letter,--just like the man."
+
+No answer. Ralph felt as he were treading a bridge of glass.
+
+"To explain it, I should have to go back to the evening of that
+meeting in the Baths of Caracalla. He came to me at the hotel, and
+after a friendly chat, just as he was leaving, took occasion to say
+some uncommonly nice things about my relations with (as I thought)
+_Maud_; so I thanked him, and gushed a little about her, maybe,--in
+my circumstances, a fellow's excusable,--and off he went, I never
+suspecting that he all the time thought I was going to marry _you_."
+
+Here Ralph was rewarded by a genuine start and a blush, but still Eve
+did not speak.
+
+"A day later," Ralph went on, determined now to do or die, "something
+I recalled of our conversation made me realize the mistake he was
+under, and I wrote him a letter explaining it. Such a time as I had to
+find his whereabouts! His banker had no instructions to forward
+anything, and I won't tell you all the ups and downs of trying to get
+at him. Finally, in despair, I sent the letter, on the chance, to
+Taormina, and from there he answered me."
+
+At this point, in revenge for her indifference, the diplomatist
+remained, in his turn, silent, until Eve, who could bear it no longer,
+turned upon him her beautiful young face, glowing in the evening light
+with an eager joy. "And--and?" she exclaimed, impetuously.
+
+"He is a good sort--Townsend," went on Ralph, reflectively. "I've an
+idea, Evie, that if you and he could have managed to hit it off, you
+would have suited each other capitally. He would be the kind likely to
+settle down into a country gentleman, too; and you would never be
+happy in town. He has brains and a heart, in addition to his good
+looks and manners, and a restrained force of character that would be
+an excellent balance for this little impulsive lady, whose only fault
+is that she jumps at conclusions instead of working to them."
+
+"You are perfectly right about that, Ralph," she said, laughing away a
+strong desire to cry. "I am learning wisdom, however, with rapidly
+advancing years. And you do only justice to my Cousin Vance, in your
+estimate of him. No doubt," here she swallowed a nervous catch in her
+voice, "if he told the truth in his letter, he congratulated you upon
+being allied to some one other than the young person who made his
+visit to Virginia last year a very hard test of patience, to say no
+more."
+
+She stopped, and tried to turn away her head. But Ralph, looking her
+gently in the face, read there what gave him courage to launch the
+last arrow in his quiver.
+
+"Whatever he said, I saw through it, Evie dear. And I--I could not
+wait to write an answer. I telegraphed my advice to come to Naples as
+fast as steam can carry him."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shortly after her conversation upon the quay with Ralph (who,
+returning to Rome, had been duly translated into anticipated bliss),
+Eve and her father took advantage of a perfect Sunday for the
+excursion up Mount Vesuvius.
+
+In a landau with two horses,--a third to be annexed on the
+ascent,--they traversed the long street formed by the villages of San
+Giovanni, La Barra, Portici, and Resina, stretching from the parent
+city--a street suggesting in the matter of population a series of
+scattered ant-hills. Such a merry, dirty, shameless horde of all ages,
+who, abandoning the dens they called homes, had issued forth under the
+sun blazing even at that early hour of morning in his vault of blue,
+to bivouac in the open highway, was never seen! Marketing,
+chaffering, vending, gossiping, cooking, eating, drinking, performing
+the rites of religion and of the toilet, the hum of their voices was
+like the note of some giant insect. It was when a stranger's carriage
+came in sight that the air became suddenly vocal with shrill cries for
+alms; vehicles and horses were surrounded, escorted by noisy beggars,
+whose half-naked children offered flowers, or turned somersaults
+perilously near the wheels.
+
+Resina passed, they could breathe more freely. The street turmoil was
+succeeded by the peace of a country road mounting between lava walls,
+over which glimpses of sea, of deep-red clover in fields, of vineyard
+or lemon grove, were finally succeeded by glorious, unobstructed views
+of the mountains, bay, and city. In the region of recent overflows,
+they saw the most curious spectacle, to the newcomer, of fertile
+garden-strips of green, where clung tiny houses, pink or whitewashed,
+daring the mute monster overhead, while close beside them the
+mountain-side was streaked with ominous stains marking the spots
+where other homes had defied him just one day too long.
+
+Higher still, in the track of the overflow of 1872, they experienced
+the striking effect of entering into a valley of desolation between
+walls of living green. Here, the lava in settling had wreathed itself
+into the forms of dragons couchant, of huge serpents, and other
+monstrous shapes that lay entwined as if asleep. Up above, arose the
+main cone of the crater, smooth as a heap of gun-powder, vast,
+majestic, cloud-circled; taking upon itself in the intense light a
+blooming purple tint; the smoke issuing from its summit now soon
+melting into space, now showing dense and threatening.
+
+Evelyn, in whom the novelty as well as beauty of the scene had aroused
+fresh spirit, looked more like her old self than her fond father had
+seen her for many a long day. But it is fortunately not given to
+parents, however solicitous, to see all the workings of young minds;
+and the good gentleman would have been indeed surprised had he divined
+the mainspring of her animation. While he was indulging in a few mild
+objections to the length and slowness of the drive, the rapacity of
+wayside beggars, the heat of the sun, etc., such as naturally occur to
+the traveller unsupported by sentimental hopes, to our young lady the
+condition of motion was a necessity, and the act of getting upward a
+relief.
+
+For the plain truth was that, since the last talk with Ralph, Evelyn
+had given rein to a thousand emotions repressed, during the months
+gone by, with stern self-chiding.
+
+Until now, recalling the year before when Vance had left her to an
+unavailing sense of regret for her harsh judgment of him, she had
+hardly realized what their intercourse together had meant to her. But
+the period of his visit was, in fact, succeeded by one in which her
+salt of life had lost its savor; and Evelyn, to her dismay, found that
+her affections had gone from her keeping to this man's, acknowledged
+to have been the suitor of her friend.
+
+That Katherine had refused Vance, and straightway married another
+lover, made very little difference to one of Eve's rigid creed in
+these matters. To her, love declared was love unchangeable; with air
+her heart she pitied Vance for his disappointment, and blamed herself
+for having repeatedly wounded him without reason. By means of this
+mode of argument, she had naturally succeeded in raising Townsend to
+the pedestal of a martyred hero, which, it may be conceived by those
+of colder judgment, did not lessen his importance in the girl's
+imagination.
+
+As the months had gone on, and she had had nothing from him save
+packages of books and prints sent according to promise, as to a polite
+entertainer who is thus agreeably disposed of by the beneficiary of
+hospitality extended, her feelings had taken on the complexion of
+hopeless regret for an irrevocable past. What Eve had henceforth to
+do, according to her own strict ordinance, was to live down the
+impulse that made her give her heart unasked. The stress of these
+emotions had, in spite of her brave efforts, so worked upon her health
+that the Colonel, as fond of home as a limpet of his rock, determined
+to try for her the change of air and experience, resulting as we have
+seen.
+
+And now, on this dazzling day, a "bridal of earth and sky" in one of
+the loveliest spots upon earth, she kept saying to herself, "By
+to-morrow--to-morrow, at latest--he will be with me! And then--and
+then--and _then_--!"
+
+The carriage halted at a little wayside booth for the sale of wines
+and fruit. A dark-skinned woman, bearing a tray of glasses, with
+flasks of the delusive _Lachrymae Christi_ (made from the grapes
+ripened upon these slopes) came forward to greet them. On Evelyn's
+side, a hawker, with shells and strings of coral, and coins alleged to
+have been found imbedded in the lava near at hand, importuned her.
+But, rejecting the others, she beckoned to a pretty, bare-legged boy
+carrying oranges garnished in their own glossy, dark-green leaves; and
+so busy was she in selecting the best of his refreshing fruit, she
+hardly observed that another claimant for her attention had appeared
+close beside the wheel.
+
+"Please go away, my good man," she said at last, laughingly, without
+giving him a glance. "Indeed, I want nothing you can supply."
+
+"That is a harsh assertion," Vance said, in a low tone meant for her
+ear, and then proceeded to greet both his cousins outspokenly.
+
+He had reached Naples early that morning; had ascertained at their
+hotel that they were engaged to start for Vesuvius at a given hour;
+fearing collision with a party of strangers, had set out alone to walk
+up the mountain and take his chance of intercepting them; and had
+waited here for the purpose.
+
+"After you had been journeying all night?" said the Colonel, with
+unfeigned surprise. "Why, my dear fellow, in your place I should
+have--"
+
+Just then he intercepted, passing between Evelyn and Vance, a look
+that startled him. That his sentence remained unfinished nobody
+observed. The Colonel drew back into his corner, as if he had been
+shot.
+
+If she had divined her father's feeling, Eve could not have pitied
+any one who was gaining Vance. And Vance, at that moment, believed all
+the world to be as happy as himself!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To a love-affair so obvious, the ending naturally to be expected is of
+the old-fashioned and inevitable sort. In the beautiful Indian summer
+of the following autumn in Virginia, these two people were duly
+married at the Hall. From far and wide came relatives to wish them
+joy; it was like the gathering of a Scotch clan at the summons of the
+pipes. Prominent among the revellers at the dance following the
+nuptial ceremony was Cousin Josey, who, in a pair of antiquated
+leather pumps with buckles, led down the middle of a reel with his
+cherished "Lady-love." To please the old boy, Evelyn had worn the
+little string of pearls bought by him, years before, for a bride who
+was never to be. And so everybody was content, and one of the cousins
+said it was "exactly like a weddin' befo' the wah."
+
+
+
+
+Out of Season
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+"No; no house-parties till the middle of July. Dear knows, what with a
+string of big dinners, my two little dances, and those tiresome
+Thursdays in January and February when everybody came, I have done all
+that could be expected by society from paupers like ourselves," said
+Mrs. Henry Gervase, settling herself in a wicker chair, on the veranda
+of her country home, and looking approvingly at her water-view.
+
+"Paupers!" said a lady from a neighboring cottage, who had dropped in
+to call. Mrs. Gervase's friends rarely liked to commit themselves to
+positive comment upon her statements until certain which way the cat
+was meant to jump. Mrs. Luther Prettyman, the wife of the dry-goods
+magnate, whose good fortune it was to own the land adjoining the
+Gervase property at Sheepshead Point,--a recently famous resort for
+summer visitors on our far eastern coast,--now contented herself with
+a little deprecatory giggle that might mean anything, and waited for
+Mrs. Gervase to go on.
+
+"Oh, well! everything is comparative; and on the scale by which people
+measure things in New York, to-day, we are simply grovelling in
+poverty. John,"--to her gardener,--"you have got that row of myosotis
+entirely out of line; and, remember, nothing but salvia behind the
+heliotropes. I like a blaze of scarlet and purple against a blue
+sea-line like this. Heavens! what a perfect afternoon! The atmosphere
+has been clarified, and those birches in the ravine 'twinkle with a
+million lights.' My dear woman, I make no apologies. Any one who wants
+me at this season of the year must take me as I am. After eight months
+of bricks and mortar, dirty streets, and stupid drives in the Park, I
+am fairly maudlin over Nature when I get her back in June.
+
+"I went to a concert where Paderewski played a night or two before he
+left America; and I give you my word that while the music was going on
+I put up my fan and plainly heard the babble of this little brook of
+mine, and the lap of the waves over the rocks at high tide, with, now
+and then, the notes of the song-sparrow that comes back every year and
+perches on my Norway pine. Somebody said of me afterwards, at supper,
+that I had been having a little nap. They may say anything of me, I
+believe, and some idiot will be found to credit it. But please don't
+accept the newspaper report that I am to have Mr. and Mrs. This, or
+Mr. That and Mrs. T'other, stopping with me at Stoneacres during June.
+I am much too busy with my granger-work, and my husband too
+industrious doing nothing, to play host and hostess now."
+
+"I did not know; I only thought--" ventured Mrs. Prettyman. "You see,
+everything is so dull here, socially, till August. And when one has a
+guest coming who is accustomed to a great deal of fashionable
+gaiety,--a young lady, a distinguished belle,--one naturally grasps at
+the idea of such pleasant house-parties as yours are known to be, dear
+Mrs. Gervase."
+
+"We shall be dull as ditch-water," answered relentless Mrs. Gervase,
+turning around to survey the struggle of a fat-breasted robin to
+extract from the turf a worm that continued to emerge in apparently
+unending length. "And if you _will_ have a girl out of season, why,
+put her on bread and milk and beauty-sleep, give her plenty of trashy
+novels and a horse to ride, and she'll do well enough."
+
+"But--perhaps I am wrong--surely Mr. Gervase told Mr. Prettyman, when
+they were smoking on our veranda last Sunday, that you are expecting
+your nephew, Mr. Alan Grove."
+
+"That's just like Mr. Gervase,--a perfect sieve for secrets," quoth
+Mrs. Gervase, contemptuously; "when I particularly requested him to
+mention Alan's visit to nobody. The poor boy is completely used up
+with work, and has engaged to get a paper ready to read before some
+scientific congress next month, and finds himself unable to write a
+line of it in town. Here, I have promised him, he may have absolute
+quiet--not be called on to play civility or squire-of-dames for any
+one; and, I may as well warn you _now_, he's not to be expected to do
+a _hand's turn_ of entertainment for your girl. Besides, I happen to
+know that he can't abide 'society' young women. He is plunged up to
+the neck in electricity, is poor, ambitious, clever, on the way to
+sure success; and I'm going to back him all I can, not put
+stumbling-blocks in his path."
+
+"How plunged up to his neck in electricity?" asked puzzled Mrs.
+Prettyman.
+
+"Electric law, my good soul; did you think it a new kind of capital
+punishment? The lucrative law of the future, I've heard wise men say.
+Simpkins!" hailing, with irresistible command, a butcher's cart that
+seemed possessed of a strong desire to drive away in a hurry from a
+side entrance to the house. "_Simpkins!_ Oh! there you are; I meant to
+leave orders with the cook not to let you get away again to-day
+without a word from me. I noticed, on the book, that you had the
+effrontery to charge sixty cents a pound for spring chickens here in
+June. Now, don't tell me! The way all you natives do; you have a short
+season, and must make the most of it. This is not your season, or my
+season, either. Wait till August before you put on the screws. And
+your sweetbreads, eighty cents a pair, when _you know_ that when Mr.
+Gervase and I first came here to live, you were _throwing sweetbreads
+away_, till we taught you the use of them! Now, mind, I shall get
+tired of sending friends to you to be fleeced in August, if this is
+what you do to me in June."
+
+"I must be running off," said Mrs. Prettyman, arising from her spot of
+shade and luxurious comfort in the deep veranda filled, though not
+encumbered, with picturesque belongings, with stands and pots of
+blooming plants in every nook. "I'll declare, nobody's flowers do as
+well as yours. And the wages we pay our head gardener! It makes me
+really envious."
+
+This, be it known, was a clever stroke on the part of neighbor
+Prettyman. Secretly resentful of the tepid interest in the personality
+of her expected guest,--who, in the eyes of the house of Prettyman,
+was an event,--she yet did not dare attempt to bring the greater lady
+to yield sympathy upon the spot. Mrs. Gervase's weakest side was for
+her flowers. She possessed the magic touch that alone nurtures them to
+perfection, and with it the proud love of a parent for children that
+grow inclined according to her will.
+
+"Hum! We do pretty well, considering this house is built on the ragged
+edge of nothing over the sea, and is swept by all the winds of heaven,
+in turn, and sometimes all together. And, in a climate where one goes
+to bed in the Tropics and wakes up at the North Pole, what would you
+have? John, there, though I'll not set him up by telling him so, has
+learned all I know about flowers, and picks up new ideas every day. By
+August, now, these beds and stands will be worth looking at. What did
+you say is the name of the young person who's coming to stop with you?
+If you've nothing better, suppose you and she and Mr. Prettyman come
+over to dinner Saturday. Alan has promised me not to work at night,
+and by that time my plants will all be in the ground and my mind at
+rest."
+
+"Thank you so much," said the lesser luminary. "It is always a treat
+to dine with you _en famille_; and it is--didn't I mention
+her?--Gladys Eliot who is coming to us to-morrow."
+
+"Gladys Eliot! Why, she's gone with her people to London for two
+months. I saw her name in the _Teutonic's_ list last Thursday. Those
+Eliots would never in the world let slip another chance for her to
+make the great match they've set out to get."
+
+"Nevertheless," said Mrs. Prettyman, with some show of spirit, "Mrs.
+Eliot, who is my old school-friend, wrote me, the day before they
+sailed, that Gladys had taken it into her head to stay behind, and
+begged me to keep her till her aunt can come up from Baltimore in July
+and take the girl in charge."
+
+"Three weeks of Gladys Eliot!" remarked Mrs. Gervase. "My poor woman,
+I pity you. By the end of the month there will be no health in you. A
+professional beauty, who has run the gauntlet of four or five years of
+incessant praises, has been advertised like 'Pear's Soap,' in England
+and America, and has failed to make her _coup_! I remember what Alan
+Grove said about her no longer ago than Christmas of last year: 'I
+haven't the advantage of Miss Eliot's acquaintance, but her and her
+kind I hold in abhorrence,--denationalized Americans; hangers-on of
+older civilizations that make a puppet-show of them; spoiled for home,
+with no rightful place abroad; restless, craving what no
+healthy-minded husband of their own kind can give them.' Bless me--and
+_those two_ are going to _meet here_!"
+
+"I think Mr. Alan Grove need not concern himself," said Mrs.
+Prettyman, driven to bay. "Mrs. Eliot mentioned in her letter that
+Gladys--it is no secret, evidently--is nearly, if not quite, engaged
+to marry some one the family feels is _in all respects_ all they could
+have hoped for her."
+
+"Then it must be either that Colonel Larkyns, the very rude man with
+large feet, who walked all over my velvet gown at the Egertons', last
+winter,--came over with Lord Glenmore, whom the Eliots tried for and
+couldn't get,--or else McLaughlin, the Irishman who made such a lot of
+money in Montana. The two men were running evenly, 'twas said. Let
+me think--didn't I see her at Claremont on McLaughlin's coach, last
+month? Pray, my dear, are we to congratulate you on having Mr.
+McLaughlin, also, as a member of your household, before long?"
+
+"Oh dear, dear!" continued the plain-spoken lady to herself, when poor
+Mrs. Prettyman, fairly routed, had retired without honors from the
+field. "Why is nature so heavenly kind to us in American places of
+resort, and 'only man is vile'? Why does this struggle for place, this
+pride of vogue, these types of our worst social element--I hate that
+word 'social,' it sounds vulgar; but what else expresses this for
+me?--follow one into this earthly Paradise? Here I have got myself
+into a pretty kettle of fish with Alan Grove. He will be bored to
+death and his visit broken up, for we can't rid ourselves of people
+who sit in our pocket, like the Prettymans in summer; and he will be
+running upon this Eliot creature perpetually. If Henry would help me,
+we might--but he is so abominably friendly and cordial with country
+neighbors, there's no hope from him. Besides, if a girl is pretty, it
+makes no earthly difference to my good man whether she is a fiend of
+calculation and cold-heartedness. I declare, I've no patience with
+Henry, anyhow."
+
+So saying, Mrs. Gervase went out to drive with the offender in
+question, behind a pair of sleek cobs, in a little buckboard of tawny
+wood with russet leather cushions and harness,--his latest
+present,--and soon, in cheerful companionship, forgot all sorrows amid
+such views of land and water as Sheepshead Point people think only
+Sheepshead Point can offer.
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+To reach Sheepshead Point, a boat steams daily, and several times a
+day, from a station on the line of a great railway skirting the
+eastern Atlantic coast. Issuing from a drawing-room car there, a young
+woman, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and jacket of sailor blue,
+with a loose shirt of red silk belted around a taper waist, her small
+head with its sailor-hat half shrouded from view in a blue tissue
+veil, walked lightly ahead of Mr. Alan Grove and, attended by an
+elderly maid, went far forward to stand in the bows of the boat.
+
+Grove, struck by the grace and distinction of her carriage, looked
+again, and then was conscious of an actual fierce jump of the heart.
+
+"Can there be two of them?" he asked of his inner man. "Doctors tell
+you if you keep your body in good order, and your mind healthily at
+work, you will never see a ghost--and yet--that's the double of the
+woman who sailed away from me last Thursday; who's haunted me during
+the six madly misspent weeks since I had the misfortune to be told off
+to take her in to dinner. Oh! no, it isn't. Yes, it is--by Jove, it
+_is_ Gladys Eliot."
+
+He was never so astonished. Believing her to be at that moment on the
+ocean, nearing British shores, Grove was fairly staggered when Miss
+Eliot, turning, espied him and, by a graciously easy nod, summoned him
+to her side. Considering the manner of their parting a few weeks back,
+he wondered at himself for the immediate abjectness of his obedience.
+
+It was a favorite phrase of Gladys Eliot's admirers to describe her as
+having a "Duchess of Leinster head and throat." Nature had certainly
+bestowed upon this daughter of nobody in particular in the Western
+Hemisphere a pose of a proud little head upon broad, sloping
+shoulders, as fine as that much-photographed great lady's. She had, in
+addition, a pair of innocent, Irish-blue eyes and a guileless smile; a
+voice, in speaking, that was sweet and low; and the best or worst
+manners in the world, so critics said, according to the desirableness
+of her interlocutor.
+
+"Mr. Grove! How perfectly extraordinary that you should be here," she
+exclaimed, giving him the tips of her well-gloved fingers, while the
+maid and dressing-bag withdrew discreetly into the background.
+
+"Did you expect me to remain forever on the steps of the Claremont
+tea-house, like a monument of a city father, to adorn the suburbs of
+New York?"
+
+"You are so quick-tempered, so unreasonable! How should I know you
+were going to take such dire offence? But please--I can't quarrel away
+off here, or even justify myself. If you are going to remain furious
+with me, at least gratify my curiosity first, and tell me how you came
+on this boat, and where you are going. Then, if you are so inclined,
+you may retire into your shell and sulk."
+
+A soft light was shining in her eye. Her voice was pleading; her face,
+most beautiful. Grove, promising himself, in street vernacular, to "go
+off and kick himself" directly afterwards, took his place at her
+elbow and gazed down hungrily upon her artless, changeful countenance.
+
+"Rather tell me why you are not about to plant your triumphant banner
+on British shores once more. I read your name in the list of those
+sailing. The newspapers have given all of your summer plans in detail,
+all the country-houses that are to receive you, all the aristocrats
+that are to send invitations to dinner, to meet your ship at
+Queenstown."
+
+She colored slightly. "As usual, you are making fun of me. What would
+be the use, since you won't believe me, of telling you my actual
+reason for backing out of this English visit, and letting my mother
+and sister go without me? No, I shan't flatter you by showing my real
+self."
+
+"I have seen enough of your real self, thank you. I believe I prefer
+the unreal, the imaginary woman I suffered myself to fancy you to be
+for a brief space after our acquaintance began."
+
+"Now you are rude," she began, her voice faltering ever so little, but
+enough to shake his equilibrium. He made a movement towards her; and
+she looked him in the face, trying to keep down the tingle of
+satisfaction in her veins. For Gladys's experience of men had taught
+her to recognize in a certain phase of incivility the existence of
+passion unsubdued. It is only indifference in his sex that can
+maintain an armor of polite self-control towards hers.
+
+Grove caught the transient gleam in her eye, and read it aright.
+Immediately he was on the defensive, and his manner froze.
+
+"I believe you know my aunt, Mrs. Gervase, in town," he said. "I think
+I saw you at one of her dances, in January."
+
+"Mrs. Gervase is the dearest thing," interrupted Miss Eliot, conscious
+of blankness in her tone.
+
+"She may be, but it would be a brave person who would tell her so. She
+is a delightful, but autocratic, personage; and one of the treats of
+the year for me is to get away to her and my uncle for a holiday, when
+they have no one else. This is one of those rare occasions. The
+cottage people who have come down to Sheepshead have a tacit agreement
+to keep to themselves, just now. They are supposed to be getting
+their houses to rights, and making gardens, and what not. Mrs. Gervase
+says they are really wearing out the past season's gloves, and putting
+tonics on their hair, and trying new cures and doses, for which there
+was no time before leaving town. The days will pass in doing as we
+please, and in the evening we shall dine well (for the Gervases have a
+corker of a cook), after which my aunt and uncle and I will take each
+a book and a lamp into some nook of the library, and read till
+bedtime. You can't imagine a life more to my taste."
+
+"Prohibitory to outsiders, at least," said Gladys. "This is, as I
+suppose you mean it to be, awfully alarming to me; for I haven't told
+you that I am for three weeks to be Mrs. Gervase's nearest neighbor. I
+am going to visit an old friend of my mother's,--Mrs. Luther
+Prettyman."
+
+Grove experienced a sensation of dismay. The Prettymans! Château
+Calicot, as he had dubbed their new florid "villa," built on the shore
+in objectionable proximity to his uncle's house, some three years
+back! He remembered the vines planted, the shrubs set out, the rattan
+screens hung, the final adjustment of chairs by Mrs. Gervase, in the
+attempt to shut out every glimpse of the Prettyman belongings from
+their place of daily rendezvous on the veranda at Stoneacres; his
+uncle's sly amusement when the cupola of the Prettyman stables, and
+the roof of a detestable little sugar-temple tea-house were projected
+on their line of vision, spite of all. Mrs. Gervase could not forgive
+herself for not having secured that point of land when land was so
+ridiculously cheap. On an average of once a day, she reminded her
+husband that she had begged him to do so, and he had put it off until
+too late.
+
+Mrs. Prettyman, unvisited by Mrs. Gervase for many months after the
+red-brown gables of her costly dwelling rose into prominence at
+Sheepshead Point, had gradually found her way into quasi-intimacy at
+Stoneacres. Mrs. Gervase, protesting that her neighbor was
+commonplace, vacuous, a being from whom one could derive nothing more
+profitable than the address of a place in town to have one's lace
+lampshades made a dollar cheaper than elsewhere, allowed herself, in
+time, to take a mild but perceptible interest in Prettyman affairs.
+Through force of habit, she had grown accustomed to survey the
+Prettyman lodge-gates, in driving, without remarking upon "the
+absurdity of gilded finials to iron railings, at a rough, seaside
+place like this." Nay, the noses of the Gervase cobs were now not
+infrequently turned in through these gilded railings. Mr. and Mrs.
+Gervase dined periodically with the Prettymans. The Prettymans
+repaired more frequently to Stoneacres. Mrs. Prettyman made capital,
+in town, of her friendship with "dear Mrs. Gervase." This, Grove, like
+the rest of the world, had come gradually to know and accept. But it
+grated on him to hear that the woman who, so far, had furnished his
+life its chief feminine influence should be associated in this way
+with the mistress of Château Calicot. It belittled his one
+passion--now put away as dead, but still his own. This, indeed, set
+the crowning touch upon his misfortune of meeting her again.
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+"My dear boy, you might have knocked me down with a feather," said
+Mrs. Gervase, upon capturing her nephew at the wharf and driving away
+with him. "Tell me at once what you mean by knowing Gladys Eliot, and
+arriving with her in that intimate sort of way, just as I had, with
+infinite trouble, succeeded in bluffing the Prettymans with a mere
+dinner on Saturday! Now you will be _having_ to call. _You_, of all
+people, hitting it off with Gladys Eliot!"
+
+"Give yourself no concern," put in Mr. Gervase, who was driving,
+looking back over his shoulder with a beaming smile; "I offer to throw
+myself into the breach. A woman as beautiful, as tall, as placid, as
+Miss Eliot commands the best homage of my heart. I forewarn you that I
+am going desperately into this affair. Such luck never came my way
+before."
+
+"Stop at the confectioner's for the macaroons, Henry," said his wife,
+ignoring transports. "Alan, you are looking wretched. When I think of
+those ruddy, brown cheeks, and the look of vigor you brought out of
+your college athletics a few years back, I'm inclined to renounce mind
+and go in for muscle exclusively. Oh, that wretched grind of life in
+New York that crushes the youth and spirit out of you poor boys that
+have to toil for a living! Surely, it isn't _only_ law that's worked
+such havoc in those pale, thin cheeks--"
+
+"My dear Agatha, your sympathy would put a well man in his bed," said
+Mr. Gervase, whose keen eyes took in more of the actual situation than
+did his wife's.
+
+"Oh well!--stop here, please; no, I won't get down, Jonas sees me; he
+will be out directly, with the parcel--you must see, Henry, that Alan
+has changed, even since--"
+
+"Alan, let me tell you of a bill our friend Jonas, here, who is a bit
+of a horse-jockey, as well as local confectioner and pastry-cook,
+sent in recently to your aunt. He had been selling her a mate to her
+chestnut, and the account ran this way:
+
+     "'MRS. H. GERVASE TO I. JONAS, DR.
+     1 lb. lady-fingers           $  0.30
+     One horse                     250.00
+     ½ lb. cream peppermints         0.20
+                                   ------
+                           Total, $250.50'"
+
+Grove was glad to cover his various discomforts with a laugh. But he
+did not find it easy to elude the vigilance of Mrs. Gervase, who bided
+her time until an opportunity presented itself for an uninterrupted
+talk with him.
+
+"Stretch yourself out on that bamboo couch, and let me put the pillows
+in," she said, when they two adjourned to the veranda, in the twilight
+after dinner. "It is such fun to have a boy to cosset once more, with
+my own lads at college, and three weeks to wait before I can get Tom
+and Louis back from New London after the boat-race."
+
+"You have such an inspired faculty for making men comfortable," Grove
+remarked, from the depths of his _bien-être_.
+
+"Custom, I suppose. An only daughter, with a father and three brothers
+to wait upon till I married, and a husband and two sons to impose on
+me since. I should not know how to handle girls. I like them, of
+course,--find them all very well in their way,--but they bother me.
+Perhaps it is that there are no old-fashioned girls any more--no young
+ones, certainly. They come into the world like Minerva from Jove's
+brain. They are so learned, or clever, or worldly-wise, read
+everything, see everything, hear everything discussed, have no
+illusions--but, there, I can't explain my preference. Men are
+captious, obstinate, whimsical, by turns; disappoint one continually
+in little things--but in the main they are so broad and big; scatter
+nonsense into thin air; are so loyal and unswerving to their beliefs;
+know where they stand, and, having made up their minds to action, do
+not change."
+
+"In short," remarked Grove, "you are like the little servant-maid in
+Cranford, when they told her to hand the potatoes to the ladies first.
+'I'll do as you bid me, ma'am, but I like the lads best.' My dearest
+auntie, there must be guardian angels specially appointed to look
+after our sex, and you are one of them. This is the age and America is
+the field for the unchecked efflorescence of young womankind. But when
+the conversation takes on this complexion, I feel it to be unfair not
+to allow the defendant the assistance of counsel; though, even if
+Uncle Henry were here, I am sure we should both be demolished
+speedily."
+
+"Never mind Henry," said that gentleman's representative. "He has got
+a new letter from a man in London whom he keeps for the purpose of
+making him miserable with catalogues of sales of books and papers he
+can't afford to buy. But he potters over them, and marks the lists,
+and writes back to the man in London, and, as you know, we do manage
+to become possessed of much more dear antiquity than the house will
+hold or our income warrant. This time, he is buried alive for an hour
+to come, for it is about a sale of Sir Philip Francis's letters and
+manuscripts at Sotheby's very soon."
+
+"I don't believe the real 'Junius' announcing himself would get me out
+of this bamboo chair and away from this deepening of eventide upon the
+sea and islands, the afterglow of sunset melting into moonlight, the
+soft caressing of the salt air blending with those hidden heliotropes
+of yours! Now, dear lady, let's go back to the concrete. I knew, the
+moment your eagle eye fell on me this afternoon, you would find out
+all that in me is. For so many years I've been telling you my scrapes,
+I may as well out with the latest and biggest of them. Two months ago,
+I took Gladys Eliot in to dinner at the Sargents'. I kept it from you
+in town, for which you'll say I am properly punished. I fell in love
+with her, like a schoolboy with green apples, heeding not the danger
+of unwholesomeness. After that, I met her when and wherever I could
+push my way to her. I thought of her, sleeping and waking; received
+from her looks and tones and words that would, as the lady novelists
+are so fond of saying, 'tempt an anchorite;' _believed_ in her!"
+
+"My poor child, how wretched!" said Mrs. Gervase, promptly.
+
+"So it proved. Last but not least of the comedy,--I skip the
+details,--I was deluded into buttoning myself up in a fluffy,
+long-tailed, iron-gray coat that I got in London last spring and had
+not had time to wear, put on a bunch of white carnations, and drove
+out to one of those inane Claremont teas in my friend Pierre Sargent's
+trap, because, forsooth, _she_ asked me. For an hour I suffered
+martyrdom in that little greenhouse sort of a veranda, with people
+herded together gossiping, and not setting their feet upon the lawn
+over the river that they came out to see. Women talked drivel to me,
+waiters slopped tea over me, and we walked on slices of buttered
+bread. Then _she_ came--on the box-seat of that brute McLaughlin's
+drag, having eyes for him only, so that every one talked of it!"
+
+"I remember--and I could not imagine what brought you there. Yes, I
+sat down on a little cake and completely ruined my new porcelain-blue
+_crépon_--those waiters were very careless. Jolly faded it trying to
+take out the spot, and Mathilde had the greatest trouble to match the
+stuff. Alan, that man McLaughlin ought to be drummed out of polite
+society. The girl who would receive his attentions, let herself be
+talked of as likely to be his wife, cannot at heart be nice. When your
+dear mother and I were girls, we would not have _looked_ at a big,
+vulgar creature like that, simply because he drove four-in-hand and
+was known to be rich. He would never have been asked to your
+grandfather's table. The materialism of this age takes, to me, no form
+more objectionable than the frank acceptance of such as he by women,
+old and young."
+
+"Exactly," said Grove, grimly. "And when I met her at his side, she
+turned away from him one moment with a banal jest for me, and then
+quickly recaptured him, as if fearful he would escape. That, even my
+infatuation would not suffer. I turned on my heel, and, until I met
+her by chance on the boat to-day, have never seen her since."
+
+"What can have been her reason for not going abroad?" said Mrs.
+Gervase, eagerly--a trifle suspiciously.
+
+Grove was silent. In his ear sounded a dulcet voice, murmuring as the
+boat neared shore: "Perhaps, when you have consented to feel better
+friends with me, you will come and let me tell you _why I stayed_."
+
+"You know, of course, that everybody says she is engaged? Her mother
+has hinted it to Mrs. Prettyman. If it be to this McLaughlin, then God
+knows you are well rid of her. If that be a blind, Alan dear,--you
+know it was always my way with you boys to scold about little things
+and let great ones pass,--I shan't add a word to your self-reproach;
+but I'll warn you--oh! I won't have the sin on my soul of letting you
+go unwarned. That woman, no matter whether she thinks she loves you or
+not, would make your misery. The parents of to-day don't trouble
+themselves to train up wives for the rank and file of our honest
+gentlemen. They create fine ladies, and look about for some one to
+take the expense of them off their hands. It is common talk that the
+Eliots have been strained to their utmost means to carry their girls
+from place to place, with the expectation of making rich marriages.
+The beauty and success of this one has apparently blinded those poor
+people to the consequences of their folly. The girl has been brought
+up to fancy herself of superior clay,--her habits are luxurious, her
+wants extravagant.
+
+"More than all, for five years she has been fed on the flatteries of
+society. Personal praise is indispensable to her. She has lived and
+consorted with the most lavish entertainers of the most reckless
+society in our republic. Even supposing that you won her beauty and
+graces for your own, what on earth could you expect to offer her in
+exchange for what she would give up? My poor, dear lad, I'm talking
+platitudes, you think; but you and Tom and Louis shall not be allowed
+to wreck your futures upon such as Gladys Eliot, while I have breath
+to speak. I'm afraid I think all marriages a mistake for young men. I
+know they are, as we measure and value things, in what we call
+'fashionable life.' Go out of it, by all means, if you can. To take
+_her_ out of it you would find to be quite another matter. And now,
+after this long homily, I've one question to put. Answer it, if you
+like--if you think I've the right to ask it. After seeing her again
+to-day, do you feel there is danger in her proximity?"
+
+"You have certainly torn sentiment to shreds," said Alan, getting up
+from amid his cushions and beginning to stride up and down the long
+veranda. Mrs. Gervase watched him without further speech. That he did
+not again allude to the subject sent her to bed with keen anxiety and
+a renewed regret that Mr. Gervase had not taken her advice about
+buying that point of land before it fell into the hands of the
+Prettymans.
+
+For the two or three days following his arrival at Stoneacres, Grove
+made no attempt to see his neighbor's guest. Once, indeed, they
+encountered her on horseback, while driving together in a family party
+in the buckboard, behind the cobs. Mr. Gervase, who, in his later
+enthusiasm about the Junius correspondence, had forgotten his
+charmer, asked who was that stunning, pretty girl, and, on being
+rallied by his wife, declared his poor sight was at fault, and that he
+meant to call on the Prettymans that very day; but Saturday brought
+with it the appointed dinner, without other overture from Stoneacres
+than cards left by Mrs. Gervase when the ladies were from home.
+
+Grove was hardly surprised when, on descending to the drawing-room in
+evening clothes, he found only that very colorless pair of Prettymans.
+Miss Eliot, it was alleged, was suffering from too long a ride in the
+hot sun of the afternoon to make the effort to come out. He saw in the
+countenance of his aunt a look of relief, which she at once proceeded
+to mask by unusual suavity to mankind in general, her flattered guests
+in particular.
+
+"The worst is over; I am safe," Grove decided. "But I like her all the
+better for that womanly holding back. Now, to live down my folly as
+best I can."
+
+He threw himself into hard work, and the days passed healthily. Mrs.
+Gervase had begun to relax her vigilance, to breathe almost free of
+care, when, upon one of his morning rides, ahead of him in a forest
+glade, he espied Gladys Eliot, in the saddle, attended by one of the
+Prettyman boys, a youngster of thirteen, mounted on a polo pony in
+process of "showing off" his and his master's accomplishments.
+
+At the sound behind them, both Gladys and the boy turned to look; and
+Grove saw that he could not retreat without a decided lack of dignity.
+He therefore rode by them, receiving from Miss Eliot a faint and
+chilly nod; from the boy,--an acquaintance of last year,--a more
+cordial salutation.
+
+"I say, Mr. Grove, _can't_ Punch take that fallen tree?" cried out the
+lad, in shrill treble. "_She_ says it's dangerous, because the bank is
+caved. Hold on one minute, and I'll show you he can clear it, bank and
+all."
+
+Punch, proving nothing loth, jumped the obstacles in question
+gallantly, but on the far side slipped on something, and spilled his
+rider among a bed of tall bracken, in which the boy lay, lost to
+sight. Both Grove and Gladys were in a minute at his side, shocked at
+finding him white and senseless.
+
+"It was not the fall," she said, rapidly. "He has heart-trouble, and
+his mother is always anxious about a sudden shock for him. He will
+outgrow it probably, the doctors say. Here, you hold him in your arms,
+while I get water from that brook. I know what to do, and he will soon
+come to himself."
+
+Grove found himself silently obeying her behests. He was struck by her
+prompt presence of mind, her deftness, and good sense. "What an
+admirable trained nurse is lost to the world in her!" he thought, and,
+when all was done, and the boy gave token of returning life, sat
+still, content to crush down moss and ferns, awkwardly holding his
+burden, while Gladys knelt so close that her breath in speaking fanned
+his cheek.
+
+"It wasn't Punch's fault. I've got a big bee buzzing in my head," were
+the welcome words they at last heard from the sufferer.
+
+"Yes, I know, Jim dear, but don't talk now till the big bee flies
+away," and the boy, closing his eyes, appeared to sleep.
+
+"Lay his head on my lap, and then, if you don't mind riding back and
+ordering some sort of a trap, without letting his mother know--"
+
+"I can't leave you here. It is too far from home, and the country
+hereabouts is quite bare of dwellings. Nor would I like you to ride so
+far alone. There; let him sleep, and we will watch him till he wakes.
+No doctor could have treated him more cleverly than you."
+
+"It's the result of a 'First Aid to the Injured' class I went to once,
+perhaps. But I always had a knack with ill people," she said, dropping
+the deep fringes of her eyes upon damask cheeks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening, Grove could do no less than call to inquire after Master
+Jim, who, not much the worse for his attack, kept his adoring mother
+in durance at his bedside, while Grove sat watching the opal flushes
+die out of a western sky, in company with Gladys. Quite another
+Gladys was this, in all save beauty and her dulcet voice, from his
+enslaver of town life.
+
+And now, to Mrs. Gervase's ill-concealed dismay, visits, meetings,
+rides, boating, began and continued daily. Grove was teaching Miss
+Eliot chess, he said, and the other things were what they call upon
+the stage "incidental divertisements."
+
+A fortnight of glorious weather had passed thus, when, on the eve of
+Grove's return to town and work, he asked Gladys to go out in a boat
+with him to watch the sunset on the water.
+
+"Now you have told me there is no reason I may not speak, I can wait
+no longer for an answer," he said, as, resting on his oars, he scanned
+her face eagerly. "When a man tears his heart out and throws it at a
+woman's feet, surely he offers something. But that, you know, is my
+all. If you can consent to share the kind of life mine has got to be
+for the next five or six years, I think I see daylight beyond. By that
+time, your first youth will be gone, you will be forgotten by the
+people who court you now, you will be a nobody in their esteem. To me,
+you will always be the one woman of the world. You will have the full
+love of my heart; and you shall see what that means, when a true man
+pours it upon you unrestrained. I don't pretend to be worth it, Heaven
+knows. But I do say you have never before been loved by a man like me,
+and you know it and feel it thoroughly. It's for you to take or leave
+me, accepting consequences."
+
+"What a stand-and-deliver kind of love-making," Gladys tried to say;
+but she was deeply stirred. Remaining silent, her eyes filled with
+tears; her head drooped towards her breast.
+
+"Gladys!" cried he, exultingly.
+
+"Don't you see, now, the real reason why I could not go abroad?" she
+said, smiling on him brightly, and lifting, at the same moment, her
+ungloved left hand to put back a loose lock of hair that the wind had
+blown across her cheek. Grove, gazing at her with his whole soul in
+his eyes, became aware of a ring upon the fourth finger,--a ring of
+such conspicuous brilliancy and choice gems as to convey but one
+meaning,--and his expression changed.
+
+"Oh! I hate it! I shall give it back!" she exclaimed, a burning blush
+settling upon her face. "I did not mean--it was an accident. I hate
+it, I tell you! Why do you look at me like that?"
+
+She tore the ring from her hand, and impetuously put it out of sight.
+Presently, as Grove, in mechanical fashion, resumed his rowing without
+a word, she cried out, passionately:
+
+"Why do you not ask me to explain all the--circumstances of my life
+since I saw you last? Why can't you understand that a girl situated as
+I am has temptations that at times seem to her irresistible? Need I
+mortify myself by telling you that I am _driven_--driven till I feel
+as if I would do anything to get rest from eternal lectures about what
+a rich marriage has got to do for me--and for others? Yes, you are
+right in saying that a man like you never before asked me to marry
+him. Because I feel that--because--because--Oh! you are cruel not to
+speak--to help me! How can I put into words that I am willing to give
+up all--"
+
+It was impossible, facing the rigid coldness of his face, to go on.
+She sat in wretched silence till they reached shore, and he gave her
+his chilly hand to help her upon the float. Then the touch of her
+fingers sent a tremor of relenting into his veins.
+
+"Oh, if I could! If I could! But he too--that other one--believed.
+Tell me; he does not still believe in you?"
+
+"I hate him," she said, doggedly. She shivered a little, as the
+quickened breeze of evening struck her thinly-clad form.
+
+Grove, clasping her hand, gazed into her eyes with a desperate resolve
+to read her heart.
+
+"Let me go--it is no use," she said, turning away from him.
+
+And, with a sigh deep as Fate, he loosened his hold of her--forever.
+
+
+
+
+On Frenchman's Bay
+
+Chapter I
+
+From Maxwell Pollock, Esq., No. -- Fifth Avenue, New York, to Stephen
+Cranbrooke, Esq., ---- Club, New York.
+
+     "May 30, 189-.
+
+     "My dear Cranbrooke:
+
+     "You will wonder why I follow up our conversation of last
+     evening with a letter; why, instead of speaking, I should
+     write what is left to be said between us two.
+
+     "But after a sleepless night, of which my little wife
+     suspects nothing, I am impelled to confide in you--my oldest
+     friend, _her_ friend, although you and she have not yet grown
+     to the comprehension of each other I hoped for when she
+     married me three years ago--a secret that has begun to weigh
+     heavy upon my soul.
+
+     "I do not need to remind you that, since our college days,
+     you have known me subject to fits of moodiness and depression
+     upon which you have often rallied me. How many times you
+     have said that a fellow to whom Fate had given health,
+     strength, opportunity, and fortune--and recently the treasure
+     of a lovely and loving wife--has no business to admit the
+     word 'depression' into his vocabulary!
+
+     "This is true. I acknowledge it, as I have a thousand times
+     before. I am a fool, a coward, to shrink from what is before
+     me. But I was still more of a fool and a coward when I
+     married her. For her sake, the prospect of my death before
+     this summer wanes impels me to own to you my certainty that
+     my end is close at hand.
+
+     "In every generation of our family since the old fellow who
+     came over from England and founded us on Massachusetts soil,
+     the oldest son has been snatched out of life upon the
+     threshold of his thirtieth year. I carried into college with
+     me an indelible impression of the sudden and distressing
+     death of my father, at that period of his prosperous career,
+     and of the wild cry of my widowed mother when she clasped me
+     to her breast, and prayed Heaven might avert the doom from
+     me.
+
+     "Everything that philosophy, science, common sense, could
+     bring to the task of arguing me out of a belief in the
+     transmission of this sentence of a higher power to me, has
+     been tried. I have studied, travelled, lived, enjoyed myself
+     in a rational way; have loved and won the one woman upon
+     earth for me, have revelled in her wifely tenderness.
+
+     "I have tried to do my duty as a man and a citizen. In all
+     other respects, I believe myself to be entirely rational,
+     cool-headed, unemotional; but I have never been able to down
+     that spectre. He is present at every feast; and, although in
+     perfectly good health, I resolved yesterday to put the
+     question to a practical test. I called at the office of an
+     eminent specialist, whom I had never met, although doubtless
+     he knew my name, as I knew his.
+
+     "Joining the throng of waiting folk in Dr. ----'s outer
+     office, I turned over the leaves of the last number of
+     _Punch_, with what grim enjoyment of its _menu_ of jocularity
+     you may conceive. When my turn came, I asked for a complete
+     physical examination. But the doctor got no farther than my
+     heart before I was conscious of awakening interest on his
+     part. When the whole business was over, he told me frankly
+     that in what he was pleased to call 'a magnificent physique,'
+     there was but one blemish,--a spot upon the ripe side of a
+     peach,--a certain condition of the heart that 'might or might
+     not' give serious trouble in the future.
+
+     "'Might or might not'! How I envied the smooth-spoken man of
+     science his ability to say these words so glibly! While I
+     took his medical advice,--that, between us, was not worth a
+     straw, and he knew it, and I knew it,--I was thinking of
+     Ethel. I saw her face when she should know the worst; and I
+     became, immediately, an abject, cringing, timorous thing,
+     that crept out of the doctor's office into the spring
+     sunshine, wondering why the world was all a-cold.
+
+     "Here's where the lash hits me: I should never have married
+     Ethel; I should, knowing my doom, have married no one but
+     some commonplace, platitudinous creature, whom the fortune I
+     shall leave behind me would have consoled. But Ethel!
+     high-strung, ardent, simple-hearted, worshipping me far
+     beyond my deserts! Why did I condemn her, poor girl, to what
+     is so soon to come?
+
+     "On the fifteenth day of the coming August, I shall have
+     reached thirty years. Before that day, the blow will fall
+     upon her, and it is my fault. You know, Cranbrooke, that I do
+     not fear death. What manly soul fears death? It is only to
+     the very young, or to the very weak of spirit, the King
+     appears in all his terrors. Having expected him so long and
+     so confidently, I hope I may meet him with a courageous
+     front. But Ethel! Ethel!
+
+     "She will be quite alone with me this summer. Her mother and
+     sisters have just sailed for the other side, and I confess I
+     am selfish enough to crave her to myself in the last hours.
+     But some one she must have to look after her, and whom can I
+     trust like you? I want you to promise to come to us to spend
+     your August holiday; to be there, in fact, when--
+
+     "In the meantime, there must be no suggestion of what I
+     expect. She, least of all, must suspect it. I should like to
+     go out to the unknown with her light-hearted, girlish laugh
+     ringing in my ears.
+
+     "When we meet, as usual, you will oblige me by saying nothing
+     of this letter or its contents. By complying with this
+     request, you will add one more--a final one, dear old man--to
+     the long list of kindnesses for which I am your debtor; and,
+     believe me, dear Cranbrooke,
+
+     "Yours, always faithfully,
+
+     "MAXWELL POLLOCK."
+
+
+"Good heaven!" exclaimed Stephen Cranbrooke, dropping the sheet as if
+it burnt him, and sitting upright and aghast. "So _this_ is the cranny
+in Pollock's brain where I have never before been able to penetrate."
+
+Later that day, Mr. Cranbrooke received another epistle, prefaced by
+the house address of the Maxwell Pollocks.
+
+     "Dear Mr. Cranbrooke," this letter ran, "Max tells me he has
+     extended to you an invitation to share our solitude _à deux_
+     in your August holiday. I need hardly say that I endorse
+     this heartily; and I hope you will not regret to learn that,
+     instead of going, as usual, to our great, big, isolated
+     country-place in New Hampshire, I have persuaded Max to take
+     a cottage on the shore of Frenchman's Bay, near Bar
+     Harbor,--but not too near that gay resort,--where he can have
+     his sailboat and canoe, and a steam-launch for me to get
+     about in. They say the sunsets over the water there are
+     adorable, and Max has an artist's soul, as you know, and will
+     delight in the picturesque beauty of it all.
+
+     "I want to tell you, confidentially, that I have fancied a
+     change of air and scene might do him good this year. He is
+     certainly not ill; but is, as certainly, not quite himself. I
+     suppose you will think I am a little goose for saying so; but
+     I believe if anything went wrong with Max, I could never
+     stand up against it. And there is no other man in the world,
+     than you, whom I would ask to help me to find out what it
+     really is that worries him,--whether ill-fortune, or
+     what,--certainly not ill-health, for he is a model of
+     splendid vigor, as everybody knows, my beautiful husband!"
+
+"This is what she calls pleasant reading for me," said plain, spare
+Stephen Cranbrooke, with a whimsical twist of his expressive mouth.
+
+     "At any rate," he read, resuming, "you and I will devote
+     ourselves to making it nice for him up there. No man, however
+     he loves his wife, can afford to do altogether without men's
+     society; and it is so hard for me to get Max to go into
+     general company, or to cultivate intimacy with any man but
+     you!
+
+     "There is a bachelor's wing to the cottage we have taken,
+     with a path leading direct to the wharf where the boats are
+     moored; and this you can occupy by yourself, having breakfast
+     alone, as Max and I are erratic in that respect. We shall
+     have a buckboard for the ponies, and our saddle-horses, with
+     a horse for you to ride; and we shall pledge each other not
+     to accept a single invitation to anybody's house, unless it
+     please us to go there.
+
+     "Not less than a month will we take from you, and I wish it
+     might be longer. Perhaps you may like to know there is no
+     other man Max would ask, and I should want, to be 'one of us'
+     under such circumstances.
+
+     "Always cordially yours,
+
+     "ETHEL POLLOCK."
+
+"I asked her for bread, and she gave me a stone," he quoted, with a
+return of the whimsical expression. "Well! neither he nor she has ever
+suspected my infatuation. I am glad she wrote as she did, though, for
+it makes the watch I mean to set over Max easier. After looking at his
+case in every aspect, I am convinced there is a remedy, if I can only
+find it."
+
+A knock, just then, at the door of Mr. Cranbrooke's comfortable
+bachelor sitting-room was followed by the appearance inside of it of a
+man, at sight of whom Cranbrooke's careworn and puzzled countenance
+brightened perceptibly.
+
+"Ha! Shepard!" he said, rising to bestow on the newcomer a hearty grip
+of the hand. "Did you divine how much I wanted to talk to a fellow who
+has pursued exactly your line of study, and one, too, who, more than
+any other I happen to be acquainted with, knows just how far mind may
+be made to influence matter in preventing catastrophe, when--but,
+there, what am I to do? It's another man's affair,--a confidence that
+must be held inviolable."
+
+"Give me the case hypothetically," said Shepard, dropping, according
+to custom, into a leathern chair out at elbows but full of comfort to
+the spine of reclining man, while accepting one of Cranbrooke's galaxy
+of famously tinted pipes.
+
+"I think I will try to do so," rejoined his friend, "since upon it
+hangs the weal or woe of two people, in their way more interesting to
+me than any others in the world."
+
+"I am all ears," said Dr. Shepard, fixing upon Cranbrooke the full
+gaze of a pair of deep-set orbs that had done their full share of
+looking intelligently into the mystery of cerebral vagaries.
+Cranbrooke, as well as he could, told the gist of Pollock's letter,
+expressing his opinion that to a man of the writer's temperament the
+conviction of approaching death was as good as an actual
+death-warrant.
+
+Shepard, who asked nothing better than an intelligent listener when
+launched upon his favorite theories, kept the floor for fifteen
+minutes in a brilliant offhand discourse full of technicalities
+intermingled with sallies of strong original thought, to which
+Cranbrooke listened, as men in such a case are wont to do, in
+fascinated silence.
+
+"But this is generalizing," the doctor interrupted himself at last.
+"What you want is a special discussion of your friend's condition. Of
+course, not knowing his physical state, I can't pretend to say how
+long it is likely to be before that heart-trouble will pull him up
+short. But the merest tyro knows that men under sentence from
+heart-disease have lived their full span. It is the obsession of his
+mind, the invasion of his nerves by that long-brooding idea, that
+bothers me. I am inclined to think the odds are he will go mad if he
+doesn't die."
+
+"Good God, Shepard!" came from his friend's pale lips.
+
+"Isn't that what _you_ were worrying about when I came in? Yes--you
+needn't answer. You think so, too; and we are not posing as wise men
+when we arrive at that simple conclusion."
+
+"What on earth are we to do for him?"
+
+"I don't know, unless it be to distract his mind by some utterly
+unlooked-for concatenation of circumstances. Get his wife to make love
+to another man, for instance."
+
+"Shepard, you forget; these are my nearest friends."
+
+"And you forget I am a sceptic about a love between the sexes that
+cannot be alienated," answered the little doctor, coolly.
+
+Cranbrooke had indeed, for a moment, lost sight of his confidant's
+dark page of life--forgotten the experience that, years ago, had
+broken up the doctor's home, and made of him a scoffer against the
+faith of woman. He was silent, and Shepard went on with no evidence of
+emotion.
+
+"When that happened to _me_, it was a dynamite explosion that
+effectually broke up the previous courses of thought within me; and,
+naturally, the idea occurs to me as a specific for the case of your
+melancholy friend. Seriously, Cranbrooke, you could do worse than
+attack him from some unexpected quarter, in some point where he is
+acutely sensitive--play upon him, excite him, distract him, and so
+carry him past the date he fears."
+
+"How could I?" asked Cranbrooke of himself.
+
+There was another knock; and, upon Cranbrooke's hearty bidding to come
+in, there entered no less a person than the subject of their
+conversation.
+
+Even the astute Shepard finished his pipe and took his leave without
+suspecting that the manly, healthy, clear-eyed, and animated Maxwell
+Pollock had anything in common with the possessed hero of Cranbrooke's
+story. Cranbrooke, who had dreaded a reopening of the subject of
+Pollock's letter, was infinitely relieved to find it left untouched.
+
+The visit, lasting till past midnight, was one of a long series dating
+back to the time when they were undergraduates at the university.
+There had never been a break in their friendship. The society of
+Cranbrooke, after that of his own wife, was to Pollock ever the most
+refreshing, the most inspiring to high and manly thought. They talked,
+now, upon topics grave and gay, without hinting at the shadow
+overlying all. Pollock was at his best; and his friend's heart went
+out to him anew in a wave of that sturdy affection "passing the love
+of woman"--rare, perhaps, in our material money-getting community,
+but, happily, still existing among true men.
+
+When the visitor arose to take leave, he said in simple fashion: "Then
+I may count on you, Cranbrooke, to stand by us this summer?"
+
+"Count on me in all things," Cranbrooke answered; and the two shook
+hands, and Pollock went his way cheerily, as usual.
+
+"Is this a dream?" Cranbrooke asked himself, when left alone. "Can it
+be possible that sane, splendid fellow is a victim of pitiful
+hallucination, or that he is really to be cut off in the golden summer
+of his days. No, it can't be; it must not be. He must be, as Shepard
+says, 'pulled up short' by main force. At any cost, I must save him.
+But how? _Anyhow!_ Max must be made to forget himself--even if I am
+the sacrifice! By George! this _is_ a plight I'm in! And Ethel, who
+adores the ground he walks upon! I shall probably end by losing both
+of them, worse luck!"
+
+The morning had struggled through Cranbrooke's window-blinds before he
+stirred from his fit of musing and went into his bedroom for a few
+hours of troubled sleep.
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Pollock took possession of their summer abiding-place on
+a glorious day of refulgent June, such as, in the dazzling atmosphere
+of Mount Desert Island, makes every more southerly resort on our
+Atlantic coast seem dull by comparison. To greet them, they found a
+world of fresh-washed young birches sparkling in the sun; of
+spice-distilling evergreens, cropping up between gray rocks; of
+staring white marguerites, and huge, yellow, satin buttercups, ablow
+in all the clearings; of crisp, young ferns and blue iris, unfolding
+amid the greenery of the wilder bits of island; haunts that were soon,
+in turn, to be blushing pink with a miracle of brier-roses.
+
+And what a charmed existence followed! In the morning, they awoke to
+see the water, beneath their windows, sparkle red in the track of the
+rising sun; the islets blue-black in the intense glow. All day they
+lived abroad in the virgin woods, or on the bay in their canoe. And,
+after sunsets of radiant beauty, they would fall asleep, lulled by the
+lapping of little waves upon the rock girdle that bound their lawn. It
+was all lovely, invigorating, healthful. Of the cottagers who composed
+the summer settlement, only those had arrived there who, like the
+Pollocks, wanted chiefly to be to themselves.
+
+In these early days of the season, Max and Ethel liked to explore on
+horseback the bosky roads that thread the island, startling the mother
+partridge, crested and crafty, from her nest, or sending her, in
+affected woe, in a direction to lead one away from where her brood was
+left; lending themselves to the pretty comedy with smiles of sympathy.
+Or else, they would rifle the ferny combs of dew-laden blossoms, all
+the while hearkening to the spring chatter of birds that did their
+best to give utterance to what wind-voice and leaf-tone failed to
+convey to human comprehension. Then, emerging from green arcades, our
+equestrians would find themselves, now, in some rocky haunt of
+primeval solitude facing lonely hilltops and isolated tarns; now,
+gazing upon a stretch of laughing sea framed by a cleft in the
+highlands.
+
+Another day, they would climb on foot to some higher mountain top, and
+there, whipped by tonic breezes, stand looking down upon the wooded
+waves of lesser summits, inland; and, seaward, to the broad Atlantic,
+with the ships; and, along the coast, to the hundreds of fiords, with
+their burden of swirling waters!
+
+Coming home from these morning expeditions with spirit refreshed and
+appetite sharpened, it was their custom to repair, after luncheon, to
+the water, and by the aid of sails, steam, or their own oars or
+paddles, cut the sapphire bay with tracks of argent brightness, or
+linger for many a happy hour in the green shadow of the sylvan shore.
+
+The month of July was upon the wane before husband and wife seemingly
+aroused to the recollection that their idyl was about to be
+interrupted by the invasion of a third person. Ethel, indeed, had
+pondered regretfully upon the coming of Cranbrooke for some days
+before she spoke of it to her husband; while Max!--
+
+The real purpose of Cranbrooke's visit, dismissed from Pollock's mind
+with extraordinary success during the earlier weeks of their stay upon
+the island, had by now assumed, in spite of him, the suggestion of a
+death-watch set upon a prisoner. He strove not to think of it. He
+refrained from speaking of it. So delicious had been to him the draft
+of Ethel's society, uninterrupted by outsiders, in this Eden of the
+eastern sea; so perfect their harmony of thought and speech; so
+charming her beauty, heightened by salt air and outdoor exercise and
+early hours, Max wondered if the experience had been sent to him as an
+especial allowance of mercy to the condemned. To the very day of
+Cranbrooke's arrival, even after a trap had been sent to the evening
+boat to fetch him, the husband and wife refrained from discussing the
+expected event.
+
+It was the hour before sunset, following a showery afternoon; and,
+standing together upon their lawn to look at the western sky, Max
+proposed to her to go out with him for awhile in the canoe. They ran
+like children, hand in hand, to the wharf, where, lifting the frail
+birch-bark craft from its nest, he set it lightly afloat. Ethel,
+stepping expertly into her place, was followed by Max, who, in his
+loose cheviot shirt, barearmed and bareheaded, flashing his red-dyed
+paddle in the clear water, seemed to her the embodiment of manly grace
+and strength.
+
+They steered out into the bay; and, as they paused to look back upon
+the shore, the glory of the scene grew to be unspeakable. Behind the
+village, over which the electric globes had not yet begun to gleam,
+towered Newport, a rampart of glowing bronze, arched by a rainbow
+printed upon a brooding cloud. Elsewhere, the multicolored sky flamed
+with changing hues, reflected in a sea of glass. And out of this sea
+arose wooded islands; and, far on the opposite shore of the mainland,
+the triple hills had put on a vestment of deepest royal purple.
+
+"I like to look away from the splendor, to the side that is in
+shadow," said Ethel. "See, along that eastern coast, how the
+reflected sunlight is flashed from the windows on that height, and the
+blue columns of hearth smoke arise from the chimneys! Doesn't it make
+you somehow rejoice that, when the color fades, as it soon must, we
+shall still have our home and the lights we make for ourselves to go
+back to?"
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"What has set you to moralizing, dear?" he asked, trying to conceal
+that he had winced at her innocent question.
+
+"Oh! nothing. Only, when one is supremely happy, as I am now, one is
+afraid to believe it will endure. How mild the air is to-night! Look
+over yonder, Max; the jewelled necklace of Sorrento's lights has begun
+to palpitate. Let us paddle around that fishing-schooner before we
+turn."
+
+"Ethel, you are crying."
+
+"Am I? Then it is for pure delight. I think, Max, we had never so fine
+an inspiration as that of coming to Mount Desert. My idea of the place
+has always been of a lot of rantipole gaieties, and people crowded in
+hotels. While this--it is a little like Norway, and a great deal like
+Southern Italy. Besides, when before have we been so completely to
+ourselves as in that gray stone lodge by the waterside, with its hood
+of green ivy, and the green hill rising behind it? Let us come every
+year; better still, let us build ourselves a summer home upon these
+shores."
+
+"Should you like me to buy the cottage we now have, so that you can
+keep it to come to when you like?"
+
+"When _you_ like, you mean. Max, it can't be you have caught cold in
+this soft air, but your voice sounds a little hoarse. Well! I suppose
+we must go in, for Mr. Cranbrooke will be arriving very soon."
+
+Ethel's sigh found an echo in one from her husband, at which the
+April-natured young woman laughed.
+
+"There, it's out! We don't want even Cranbrooke, do we? To think the
+poor, dear man's coming should have been oppressing both of us, and
+neither would be first to acknowledge it! After all, Max darling, it
+is your fault. It was you who proposed Cranbrooke. I knew, all along,
+that I'd be better satisfied with you alone. Now, we must just take
+the consequence of your overhasty hospitality, and make him as happy
+as we are--if we can."
+
+"If we can!" said Max; and she saw an almost pathetic expression drift
+across his face--an expression that bewildered her.
+
+"Why do you look so rueful over him?"
+
+"I am thinking, perhaps, how hard it will be for him to look at
+happiness through another man's eyes."
+
+"Nonsense! Mr. Cranbrooke is quite satisfied with his own lot. He is
+one of those self-contained men who could never really love, I think,"
+said Mrs. Pollock, conclusively.
+
+"He has in some way failed to show you his best side. He has the
+biggest, tenderest heart! I wish there was a woman fit for him,
+somewhere. But Stephen will never marry, now, I fear. She who gets him
+will be lucky--he is a very tower of strength to those who lean on
+him."
+
+"As far as strength goes, Max, you could pick him up with your right
+hand. It may be silly, but I do love your size and vigor; when I see
+you in a crowd of average men, I exult in you. Imagine any woman who
+could get _you_ wanting a thin, sallow person like Cranbrooke!"
+
+"He can be fascinating, when he chooses," said Max.
+
+"The best thing about Cranbrooke, Max, is that he loves you," answered
+his wife, wilfully.
+
+"Then I want you, henceforth, to try to like him better, dear; to like
+him for himself. He is coming in answer to my urgent request; and I
+feel certain the more you know of him, the more you will trust in him.
+At any rate, give him as much of your dear self as I can spare, and
+you will be sure of pleasing me."
+
+"Max, now I believe it is you who are crying because you are too
+happy. I never heard such a solemn cadence in your voice. I don't want
+a minute of this lovely time to be sad. When we were in town, I
+fancied you were down--about something; now, you are yourself again;
+let me be happy without alloy. I am determined to be the _cigale_ of
+the French fable, and dance and sing away the summer. Between us, we
+may even succeed in making that sober Cranbrooke a reflection of us
+both. There, now, the light has faded; quicken your speed; we must go
+ashore and meet him. See, the moon has risen--O Max darling, to please
+me, paddle in that silver path!"
+
+This was the Ethel her husband liked best to see,--a child in her
+quick variations of emotion, a woman in steadfast tenderness.
+Conquering his own strongly excited feeling, he smiled on her
+indulgently; and when, their landing reached, Cranbrooke's tall form
+was descried coming down the bridge to receive them, he was able to
+greet his friend with an unshadowed face.
+
+The three went in to dinner, which Ethel, taking advantage of the
+soft, dry air, had ordered to be served in a _loggia_ opening upon the
+water. The butler, a sympathetic Swede, had decked their little round
+table with wild roses in shades of shell-pink, deepening to crimson.
+The candles, burning under pale-green shades, were scarcely stirred by
+the faint breeze. Hard, indeed, to believe that, upon occasion, that
+couchant monster, the bay, could break up into huge waves, ramping
+shoreward, leaping over the rock wall, upon the lawn, up to the
+_loggia_ floor, and there beat for admission to the house, upon
+storm-shutters hastily erected to meet its onslaught!
+
+To-night, a swinging lantern of wrought iron sent down through its
+panels of opal glass a gentle illumination upon three well-pleased
+faces gathered around the dainty little feast. Ethel, who, in the days
+of gipsying, would allow no toilets of ceremony, retained her
+sailor-hat, with the boat-gown of white serge, in which her infantile
+beauty showed to its best advantage. Cranbrooke was dazzled by the new
+bloom upon her face, the new light in her eye.
+
+Pollock, too, tall, broad-shouldered, blonde, clean-shaven save for a
+mustache, his costume of white flannel enhancing duly the transparent
+healthiness of his complexion, looked wonderfully well--so Cranbrooke
+thought and said.
+
+"Does he not?" cried Ethel, exultingly. "I knew you would think so.
+Max has been reconstructed since we have lived outdoors in this
+wonderful air. Just wait, Mr. Cranbrooke, till we have done with you,
+and you, too, will be blossoming like the rose."
+
+"I, that was a desert, you would say," returned Cranbrooke, smiling.
+Involuntarily it occurred to him to contrast his own outer man with
+that of his host. Somehow or other, the fond, satisfied look Ethel
+bestowed upon her lord aroused anew in their friend an old, teasing
+spirit of envy of nature's bounty to another, denied to him.
+
+As the moon transmuted to silver the stretch of water east of them,
+and the three sat over the table, with its _carafes_ and decanters and
+egg-shell coffee-cups, till the flame of a cigar-lighter died utterly
+in its silver beak, their talk touching all subjects pleasantly,
+Cranbrooke persuaded himself he had indeed been dreaming a bad dream.
+The journey thither, of which every mile had been like the link of a
+chain, was, for him, after all, a mere essay at pleasure-seeking. He
+had come on to spend a jolly holiday with a couple of the nicest
+people in the world--nothing more! His fancies, his plans, his
+devices, conceived in sore distress of spirit, were relegated to the
+world of shadows, whence they had been summoned.
+
+When Ethel left the two men for the night, and the butler came out to
+collect his various belongings, Pollock rose and bade Cranbrooke
+accompany him to see the mountains from the other side of the house.
+Here, turning their backs on the enchantment of the water view, they
+looked up at an amphitheatre of hills, dominated in turn by rocky
+summits gleaming in the moon. But for the lap of the water upon the
+coast, the stir of a fresh wind arising to whisper to the leaves of a
+clump of birches, Mother Earth around them was keeping silent vigil.
+
+"What a perfect midsummer night!" said Cranbrooke, drawing a deep
+breath of enjoyment. "After the heat and dust of that three hundred
+miles of railway journey from Boston, this _is_ a reward!"
+
+"We chose better than we knew the scene of my euthanasia," answered
+Pollock, without a tremor in his voice.
+
+A thrill ran through Cranbrooke's veins. He could have sworn the air
+had suddenly become chill, as if an iceberg had floated into the bay.
+He tried to respond, and found himself babbling words of weak
+conventionality; and all the while the soul of the strong man within
+him was saying: "It must not be. It shall not be. If I live, I shall
+rescue you from this ghastly phantom."
+
+"Don't think it necessary to give words to what you feel for me," said
+Pollock, smiling slightly. "You are not making a brilliant success of
+it, old man, and you'd better stop. And don't suppose I mean to
+continue to entertain my guest by lugubrious discussions of my
+approaching _finale_. Only, it is necessary that you should know
+several things, since the event may take us unawares. I have made you
+my executor, and Ethel gets all there is; that's the long and short of
+my will, properly signed, attested, and deposited with my lawyer
+before I left town. Ethel's mother and sisters will be returning to
+Newport in a fortnight, and they will, no doubt, come to the poor
+child when she needs them. There _must_ be some compensation for a
+decree of this kind, and I have it in the absolute bliss I have
+enjoyed since we came here. That child-wife of mine is the most
+enchanting creature in the world. If I were not steeped in
+selfishness, I could wish she loved me a little less. But all emotions
+pass, and even Ethel's tears will dry."
+
+"Good Heaven, Max, you are talking like a machine! One would think
+this affair of yours certain. Who are you, to dare to penetrate the
+mystery of the decrees of your Maker--"
+
+"None of that, if you please, Cranbrooke," interrupted Pollock; "I
+have fought every inch of the way along there, by myself, and have
+been conquered by my conviction. Did I tell you that my father, before
+me, struggled with similar remonstrances from _his_ friends? The
+parsons even brought bell and book to exorcise his tormentor--and all
+in vain. He was snuffed out in full health, as I shall be, and why
+should I whine at following him? Come, my dear fellow, I am keeping
+you out of a capital bed, from sleep you must require. There's but one
+matter in which you can serve me,--take Ethel into your care. Win her
+fullest confidence; let her know that when I am not there, _you will
+be_."
+
+Cranbrooke went to his room, but not to rest. When his friends next
+saw him, he was returning from a solitary cruise about the bay in a
+catboat Pollock kept at anchor near their wharf.
+
+"Why, Mr. Cranbrooke!" cried Ethel, lightly. "The boatman says you
+have been out ever since daybreak. But that we espied the boat tacking
+about beyond that far rock, I should have been for sending in search
+of you."
+
+"Cranbrooke is an accomplished sailor," said Max. "But just now,
+breakfast's the thing for him, Ethel. See that he is well fed, while I
+stroll out to the stable and look after the horses."
+
+As he crossed the greensward, Ethel's gaze followed him, till he
+disappeared behind a clump of trees. Then she turned to her guest.
+
+"Let me serve you with all there is, until they bring you something
+hot," she said, with her usual half-flippant consideration of him. "Do
+you know you look very seedy? I have, for my part, no patience with
+these early morning exploits."
+
+"If you could have seen the world awakening as I saw it, this morning,
+you would condone my offence," he answered, a curious expression Ethel
+thought she had detected in his eyes leaving them unclouded, as he
+spoke.
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+No one who knew Stephen Cranbrooke well could say he did anything by
+halves. In the days that followed his arrival at Mount Desert, Max
+Pollock saw that his friend was lending every effort to the task of
+establishing friendly relations with his wife. From her first
+half-petulant, half-cordial manner with him,--the manner of a woman
+who tries to please her husband by recognition of the claim of his
+nearest male intimate,--Ethel had passed to the degree of manifestly
+welcoming Cranbrooke's presence, both when with her husband and
+without him.
+
+As Max saw this growing friendship, he strove to increase it by
+absenting himself from Ethel, instead of, as heretofore, spending
+every hour he could wring from the society of other folk, in the light
+of her smiles. His one wish that Ethel might be insensibly led to
+find another than himself companionable; that she might be, though
+never so little, weaned from her absolute dependence upon him for
+daily happiness, before the blow fell that was to plunge her in
+darkest night, kept him content in these acts of self-sacrifice.
+
+But, as was inevitable, his manner toward them both underwent a
+trifling change. His old buoyancy of affection was succeeded by a
+quiet, at times wistful, recognition of the fact that his friend and
+his wife had now found another interest besides himself. But he was
+proud to see Cranbrooke had justified his boast that he "could be
+fascinating when he chose;" and he was glad to think Cranbrooke at
+last realized the charm Ethel, apparently a mere bright bubble upon
+the tide of society, had to a man of intellect and heart. "It was as I
+said," the poor fellow repeated to himself, trying to find comfort in
+the realization of his prescience; and when Ethel, alone with him,
+would break into pæans of his friend, and wonder how she could have
+been so blind to the "real man" before, Max answered her loyally that
+his highest wish for both of them was at last gratified.
+
+Then the day came when there was question of a companion for Ethel in
+a sailing-party to which she had accepted an invitation--and for Max
+was destined an emotion something like distaste.
+
+They were sitting over the breakfast table,--a meal no longer
+exclusive to wife and husband, as had been agreed, but shared by
+Cranbrooke with due regularity,--when Ethel broached the subject.
+
+"You know, Max, I was foolish enough to promise that irresistible Mrs.
+Clayton--when she would not take no for an answer, yesterday,--that
+_some_ of us would join her water party to-day. It is to be an idle
+cruise, with no especial aim--luncheon on board their schooner-yacht;
+the sort of thing I knew would bore you to extinction--being huddled
+up with the same people half the day."
+
+"It is the opening wedge--if you go to this, you will be booked for
+others, that's all," said Max, preparing to say, in a martyrized way,
+that he would accompany her, if she liked.
+
+"Oh, I knew you would feel that; and so I told her she must really
+excuse my husband, but that I had no doubt Mr. Cranbrooke would accept
+with pleasure. You see, Mr. Cranbrooke, what polite inaccuracies you
+are pledged by friendship to sustain."
+
+"I _will_ go with pleasure," Stephen said, with what Max thought
+almost unnecessary readiness.
+
+"Bravo!" cried Ethel. "This is the hero's spirit. And so, Max dear,
+you will have a long day to yourself while I am experimenting in
+fashionable pleasuring, and Mr. Cranbrooke is representing you in
+keeping an eye on me."
+
+"You will, of course, be at home to dinner?" said her husband.
+
+"Surely. Unless breezes betray us, and we are driven to support
+exhausted nature upon hardtack and champagne; for, of course, all of
+the Claytons' luncheon will be eaten up, and there are no stores
+aboard a craft like that. Will you order the buckboard for ten, dear?
+We rendezvous at the boat-wharf. And, as there is no telling when we
+shall be in, don't trouble to send to meet me. Mr. Cranbrooke and I
+will pick up a trap to return in."
+
+Max saw them off in the buckboard; and, as Ethel turned at some little
+distance and looked back at him, where he still stood on the gravel
+before their vine-wreathed portal, waving her hand with a charming
+grace, then settling again to a _tête-à-tête_ with Cranbrooke, he felt
+vaguely resentful at being left behind.
+
+The clear, dazzling atmosphere, the sense of youthful vitality in his
+being, made him repel the idea of exclusion from any function of the
+animated world. He almost thought Ethel should have given him a chance
+to say whether or no he would accompany her. Was it not, upon her
+part, even a little bit--a _very_ little bit, lacking in proper wifely
+feeling, to be so prompt in dispensing with his society, to accept
+that of others for a whole, long, bright summer's day of pleasuring?
+
+This suggestion he put away from him as quickly as it came. He was
+like a spoiled child, he said to himself, who does not expect to be
+taken at his word. Ethel well knew his dislike of gossiping groups of
+idle people; equally well she remembered, no doubt, his frequent
+requests that she would mingle more with the world, take more pleasure
+on her own account. And Cranbrooke,--dear old Cranbrooke,--of course
+he was ready to punish himself by going off on such a party, when it
+was an opportunity to serve his friend!
+
+So Max put his discontent away, and, mounting his horse, went off
+alone for a ride half around the island, lunching at Northeast Harbor,
+and returning, through devious ways, by nightfall.
+
+Restored to healthy enjoyment of all things by his day in the saddle,
+he turned into the avenue leading to their house, buoyed up by the
+sweet hope of Ethel returned--Ethel on the watch for him. Already, he
+saw in fancy the gleam of her jaunty white yachting-costume between
+the tubs of flowering hydrangeas ranged on either side the walk before
+their door. The lamps inside--the "home lights," of which she had once
+fondly spoken to him--were already lighted. She would, perhaps, be
+worrying at his delay. He quickened his speed, and rode down the
+avenue to the house at a brisk trot. The groom, who, from the stable,
+had heard the horse's feet, started up out of the shrubbery to meet
+him. But there was no other indication of a watch upon the movements
+of the master of the house.
+
+"Mrs. Pollock has not returned, then?" he asked, conscious of
+blankness in his tone.
+
+"No, sir; not yet. Our orders were, not to send for her, sir, as there
+was no knowing when the party would get in."
+
+"Yes, the breeze has pretty much died out since sunset," said Pollock,
+endeavoring to mask his disappointment by commonplace.
+
+He went indoors; and the house, carefully arranged though it was, with
+flowers and furniture disposed by expert hands to greet the returning
+of the master, seemed to him dull and chill. He ordered a cup of tea
+for himself, and, bending down, put a match to the little fire of
+birch-wood always kept laid upon the hearth of their picturesque hall
+sitting-room.
+
+In a moment, the curling wreathes of pale azure that arose upon the
+pyre of silvery-barked logs was succeeded by a generous flame. The
+peculiarly sweet flavor of the burning birch was distilled upon the
+air. Sipping the cup of tea, as he stood in his riding-clothes before
+the fire, Max felt a consoling warmth invade his members and expand
+his heart.
+
+"They will be in directly," he said; "and, by George, I shall be as
+ready for my dinner as they for theirs."
+
+In one corner of the hall stood a tall, slender-necked vase, where he
+had that morning watched Ethel arranging a sheaf of goldenrod with
+brown-seeded marsh-grasses,--a combination her touch had made
+individual and artistic to a striking degree. He recalled how, as she
+had finished it, she looked around, calling him and Stephen from their
+newspapers to admire her handiwork. He, the husband, had admired it
+lazily from his divan of cushions in the corner. Cranbrooke had gone
+over to stand beside his hostess, and thence they had passed, still in
+close conversation, out to the grassy terrace above the sea.
+
+Now, why should this recollection awaken in Max Pollock a new sense
+of the feeling he had been doing his best to dispose of all day? He
+could not say; but there it was, to prick him with its invisible
+sting. Then, too, the dinner-hour was past, and he was hungry.
+
+He went out upon the veranda at the rear, and surveyed the expanse of
+water. Far off, between the electric ball that hung over the wharf of
+the village, and the point of Bar Island, opposite, he saw a bridge of
+lights from yachts of all sorts, with which the harbor was now full.
+He fancied a little moving star of light, that seemed to creep beneath
+the large ones, might be the Claytons' boat on her return, and, after
+another interval of watching, called up a wharf authority by
+telephone, and asked if the _Lorelei_ was in.
+
+"Not yet, sir," was the reply. "Probably caught out when the wind
+fell. Will let you know the minute they are in sight." With which
+assurance Mr. Pollock was finally driven by the pangs of natural
+appetite to sit down alone to a cheerless meal.
+
+There was a message by telephone, as he finished his repast. The
+_Lorelei_ was in, and Mrs. Pollock desired to speak with her husband.
+
+"We're all right," Ethel's voice said, "and I hope you haven't been
+worried. They _insist_ on our going to dinner at a restaurant, and, of
+course, you understand, I can't spoil the fun by refusing. _Couldn't_
+you come down and meet us?"
+
+His first impulse was to say yes; but a second thought withheld him.
+He gave her a pleasant answer, however, bidding her enjoy herself
+without thought of him, and adding: "Cranbrooke will look out for you
+and bring you home."
+
+It was quite ten o'clock when they arrived at the cottage, Ethel in
+high spirits, flushed with the excitement of a merry day, full of
+chatter over people and things Max had no interest in, appealing to
+Cranbrooke to enjoy her retrospects with her. She was "awfully sorry"
+about having kept Max from his dinner; "awfully sorry" not to have
+come home at once, but there was no getting out of the impromptu
+dinner; and, of course, they had to wait for it; and she was the
+first, after dinner, to make the move to go; Mr. Cranbrooke would
+certify to that.
+
+"I don't need any certification, dear," said Max, gently; but he did
+not smile. Cranbrooke, who sat with him after sleepy Ethel had retired
+from the scene, felt his heart wrung at thought of certain things that
+never entered into Ethel's little head. But he made no effort to
+dispel the cloud that had settled over his friend's face.
+
+By and by, Cranbrooke, too, said good-night, and went off into his
+wing, and Max was left alone with his cigar.
+
+The day on the water had verified Max's prediction that it would prove
+"an opening wedge." Ethel, caught in the tide of the season's
+gaieties, found herself impelled from one entertainment to the other;
+their cottage was invaded by callers, their little informal dinners
+were transformed into banquets of ceremony, as choice and more lively
+than those of their conventional life in town. The only persons really
+satisfied by the change of habits in the house were the servants,
+who, like all artists, require a public to set the seal upon their
+worth.
+
+Max, bewildered, found himself sometimes accompanying his wife to her
+parties; oftener--struck with the ghastly inappropriateness of his
+presence in such haunts--stopping at home and deputing to Cranbrooke
+the escort of his wife. To his surprise, he perceived that Cranbrooke
+was not only ready, but eager, on all occasions, to carry Ethel away
+from him. But then, of course, this was precisely what he had wished.
+
+And Ethel, who lost no opportunity to tell Max how "good," how
+"lovely," Cranbrooke had been to her, was she not carrying out to the
+letter her husband's wishes? He observed, moreover, that Ethel was
+even more impressed than he had expected her to be with that quality
+of "fascination." Cranbrooke's mind was like a beautiful new country
+into which she was making excursions, she said once; and Max, after a
+moment's hesitation, agreed with her very warmly.
+
+At last, Maxwell Pollock awoke one morning, with a start of
+disagreeable consciousness, to the fact that this was the eve of his
+thirtieth birthday. Occupied as he had been with various thoughts that
+had to do with his transient relations to this sublunary sphere, he
+had actually allowed himself to lose sight of the swift approach of
+his day of doom. Now, he arose, took his bath, dressed, and without
+arousing his wife, who, in the room adjoining, slept profoundly after
+a gay dance overnight, went alone to the waterside, with the intention
+of going out in his canoe.
+
+Early as he was, Cranbrooke was before him, carrying the canoe upon
+his head, moving after the fashion of some queer shelled-creature down
+to the float.
+
+Max realized, with a sense of keen self-rebuke, that the spectacle of
+his friend was repellant to him, and the prospect of a talk alone with
+Stephen on this occasion, the last thing he would have chosen.
+
+And--evidently a part of the latter-day revolution of
+affairs--Cranbrooke seemed to have forgotten that this day meant more
+than another to Pollock. He greeted him cheerily, in commonplace
+terms, commented on their identity of fancy in the matter of a paddle
+at sunrise, and offered to relinquish the craft in favor of its owner.
+
+"Of course not. Get in, will you," said Max, throwing off his coat;
+and, taking one of the paddles, while Cranbrooke plied the other,
+their swift, even strokes soon carried them far over toward the
+illuminated east.
+
+When well out upon the bay, they paused to watch the red coming of the
+sun. Beautiful with matin freshness was the sleeping world around
+them; and, inspired by the scene, Max, who was kneeling in the bow,
+turned to exclaim to Cranbrooke, with his old, hearty voice, upon the
+reward coming to early risers in such surroundings.
+
+"Jove, a man feels born again when he breathes air like this!"
+
+Cranbrooke started. It was almost beyond hope that Max should use such
+a phrase, in such accents, at such a juncture. Immediately, however,
+the exhilaration died out of Pollock's manner; and, again turning away
+his face, he showed that his thoughts had reverted to the old sore
+spot. He did not see the expression of almost womanly yearning in
+Cranbrooke's face when the certainty of this was fixed upon his
+anxious mind.
+
+The two men talked little, and of casual things only, while abroad. As
+they returned to the house, Cranbrooke made a movement as if to speak
+out something burning upon his tongue, and then, repressing it, walked
+with hasty strides to his own apartment.
+
+The day passed as had done those immediately preceding it. Calls, a
+party of guests at luncheon, a drive, absorbed Ethel's hours from her
+husband. When she reached home, at tea-time, he had come in from
+riding, and was standing alone in the hall, awaiting her.
+
+"How nice to find you here alone!" she cried, going up to kiss him,
+and then taking her place behind the tea-tray. "Do sit down, and let
+us imagine we are back in those dear old days before we were
+overpowered by outsiders. Never mind! The rush will soon be over; we
+shall be to ourselves again, you and I and--how stupid I am!" she
+added, coloring. "You and I, I mean, for he must go back to town."
+
+"You mean Cranbrooke?" he said, as she thought, absent-mindedly, but
+in reality with something like a cold hand upon his heart, that for a
+moment gave him a sense of physical apprehension. Had _it_ come, he
+wondered?
+
+But no, this was not physical; this was a shock of purely emotional
+displeasure. Could he believe his ears, that Ethel, his wife, had
+indeed blended another than himself with her dream of returning
+solitude?
+
+"Yes, it will be all over soon," he said, mechanically. "Had you a
+pleasant drive? And did you enjoy the box-seat with Egmont?"
+
+"Oh! Egmont, fortunately, can drive--if he _can't_ talk," she
+answered, lightly. "I suppose I am fastidious, or else spoiled for the
+conversation of ordinary men, after what I have had recently from
+Cranbrooke. By the way, Max dear, are you relentless against going
+with us to-night, to the _fête_ at the canoe club? You needn't go
+inside the club-house, you know. It will be lovely to look at, from
+the water."
+
+"With _us_? Then Cranbrooke has already promised?"
+
+"Yes, of course; he could not leave me in the lurch, could he, when my
+husband is such an obstinate recluse?"
+
+"And how do you intend to get there?"
+
+"By water, stupid, of course; how else? I will be satisfied with the
+rowboat, if you won't trust me in the canoe; but Mr. Cranbrooke is
+such an expert with the paddle, I shouldn't think you would object to
+letting me go with him. It will be perfectly smooth water, and the air
+is so mild. Do say I may go in the canoe, dear; it's twice the fun."
+
+"I think you know that, unless I take you, it is my wish you go
+nowhere at night in a canoe," he answered, coldly.
+
+Ethel was more hurt at his tone than disappointed by his refusal. She
+could not think what had come over her husband, of late, so often had
+this constrained manner presented itself to her advance. She set it
+down to her unwonted indulgence in society, and promised herself,
+with a sigh of relinquishment, that, after this summer, she would go
+back to her life lived for Max alone.
+
+Then, Cranbrooke coming in with two or three visitors, who lingered
+till almost dinner-time and were persuaded easily to stop for dinner,
+there was no chance to indulge in meditations, penitential or
+otherwise. When her guests took their departure, it was in the little
+steam-launch, she and Cranbrooke accompanying the party, and all bound
+for the _fête_, to be given on a wooded island in the bay. As they
+were leaving the house, something impelled her to run back and, in the
+semi-darkness of the veranda, seek her husband's side.
+
+"Max darling, kiss me good-by. Or, if you want me, let me stay with
+you."
+
+"No, no; I want you to enjoy every moment while you can," he said,
+withdrawing from her gaze to the shadow of a vine-wreathed column.
+
+"Max, your voice is strange. And once, at dinner, I saw you looking at
+me, and there was something in your eyes that frightened me. If you
+hadn't smiled, and lifted your glass to pledge me, I should not have
+known what to think."
+
+"Ethel! Wife! Do you love me?" he said, catching her to his heart.
+
+"Max! Why, Max! You foolish boy, we shall be seen."
+
+"Tell me, and kiss me once more, my own, my own!"
+
+"They are all aboard except you, Mrs. Pollock," a voice said; and,
+from the dew of the lawn, Cranbrooke stepped upon the veranda.
+
+Max started violently, and let his wife go from his embrace.
+
+"You see how rude you are making me toward our guests," said Ethel.
+"You have my wrap, Mr. Cranbrooke? Good-night, Max; and to-morrow I'll
+tell you all about it. Better change your mind and come after us,
+though."
+
+"Max need not trouble to do so," put in Cranbrooke, in a muffled
+voice. "As usual, I will fill his place."
+
+Max thought he almost hurried her away. They went down the slope of
+the lawn together; and, at the steep descent leading to the bridge,
+he saw Ethel stumble, and Cranbrooke throw his arm around her to
+steady her.
+
+And now, a passion took possession of Maxwell Pollock's being that
+impelled him to the impetuous action of following them to the wharf,
+and gesticulating madly after the swift little steamer that bore them
+away from him.
+
+"He dared take her, did he, when she would have stayed at a word from
+me? I see all, now. Specious, false, damnably false, he has snared her
+fancy in his net. But she loves me, I'll swear she loves me, and I'll
+snatch her from him, if it is with the last effort of my strength. Is
+there time? Well, what is to come, let it come! While there's life in
+me, she is mine."
+
+A moment, and he was afloat in the canoe, no sign of weakness in his
+powerful stroke with the paddle, no thought in his brain but the one
+intense determination of the male creature to wrest his beloved from
+the hands of his rival.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every one conceded this to be quite the prettiest and most taking
+event of the season. The rustic club-house, its peaked gable and
+veranda defined with strings of colored lanterns, sent forth the music
+of a band, while to its portal trooped maidens and cavaliers, landing
+at the wharf from every variety of craft. The woods behind were linked
+with chains of light, the shore below lit with bonfires, and more
+evanescent eruptions of many-hued fireworks. Rockets hissed through
+the air, and broke in a rain of violet, green, and crimson meteors,
+till the zenith was a tangled mesh made by the trails of them;
+fire-balloons arose and were lost among the stars; little fire-boats,
+launched from vessels stocked for the purpose, bore their blazing
+cargoes out upon the tide; other unnamed monsters were let loose to
+carry apparent destruction zigzag through the waves. Every attendant
+yacht, sloop, launch, rowboat, or canoe, with which the water about
+the island was covered, carried quaint decoration in the guise of
+Chinese lanterns. Some of the smaller boats were arched with these;
+others tossed bouquets of fiery bubbles into the air. Creeping about
+at a snail's pace among the crowded boats, invisible canoes carried
+silent passengers; an occasional "oh!" of exclamation at the beauty of
+the scene, the only contribution people felt inclined to make to
+conversation. It was a pageant of bedazzlement, as if witches, gnomes,
+spirits of earth, air, and the underworld, had mingled their resources
+to enchant the eyes of mortals. And over all, sailed the lady-moon
+serenely, forgotten, but sure that her time would come again.
+
+Max found his launch without difficulty, on the outer circle of the
+amphitheatre of light. As he had divined, it was empty, save for the
+two boatmen.
+
+"The ladies went ashore, sir," one of his men said, in answer to his
+inquiry. "All but Mrs. Pollock, sir."
+
+"Mrs. Pollock? Where is she, then?" he asked, briefly.
+
+"She took our rowboat, sir, and went off on the water with one of the
+gentlemen. Mr. Cranbrooke, I think it was; and they ordered us to wait
+just here. No good going ashore, sir, if you want to see. It's better
+from this point, even, than nearer in."
+
+"Very well," said the master, and at once his canoe moved off to be
+lost in the crowd.
+
+He had sought for them in vain, peering into all the small boats
+whenever the flash-light of the rockets, or the catharine-wheels on
+the coast, lit the scene. Many a tender interlude was thus revealed;
+but of the two people he now longed with the fever of madness to
+discover, he saw nothing.
+
+At last, in a burst from a candle rocket, there was a glimpse of
+Ethel's red boat-cloak, her bare, golden head rising above it. She was
+sitting in the stern of the rowboat, Cranbrooke beside her, their bow
+above water, their oars negligently trailing. Ethel's eyes were fixed
+upon the glittering panorama; but Cranbrooke's eyes were riveted on
+her.
+
+With an oath, Max drove his paddle fiercely into the sea. The canoe
+sped forward like an arrow. Blind with anger, he did not observe that
+he was directly in the track of a little steamer laden with new
+arrivals, turning in toward the wharf.
+
+A new day dawned before the doctors, who had been all night battling
+for Maxwell Pollock's life, left him restored to consciousness, and
+reasonably secure of carrying no lasting ill effect from the blow on
+his head received by collision with the steamer.
+
+Carried under with his canoe, he had arisen to full view in the glare
+from a "set piece" of fireworks on the shore, beside the boat
+containing Cranbrooke and his wife. It was Cranbrooke, not Ethel, who
+identified the white face coming to the surface within reach of his
+hand, then sinking again out of sight. It was Cranbrooke, also, who
+sprang to Pollock's rescue, and, floating with his inert body, was
+dragged with him aboard the launch.
+
+As the rosy light of the east came to play upon Pollock's features, he
+opened his eyes for the first time with a look of intelligence. At his
+bedside, Ethel was kneeling, her whole loving soul in her gaze.
+
+"Is this--I thought it was heaven," he said, feeling for her hand.
+
+"It is heaven for me, now that I have you back, my own darling," she
+answered, through happy tears.
+
+"Have I been here long?"
+
+"A few hours since the accident. The doctors say you will be none the
+worse for it. And, Max dear, only think! This is your birthday! Your
+thirtieth birthday! Many, many, _many_ happy returns!" and she
+punctuated her wish with warm kisses.
+
+At that juncture, Cranbrooke came into the room and stood at the side
+of the bed opposite Ethel, who had no eyes for him, but kept on gazing
+at her recovered treasure as if she could never have enough.
+
+Max, though aware of Stephen's presence, made no movement of
+recognition, till Ethel spoke in playful chiding.
+
+"Darling! Where are your manners? Aren't you going to speak to our
+friend, and thank him for saving you--saving you for _me_, thank God!"
+
+She buried her face in the bed-clothes, overcome with the
+recollection; but even with the exquisite tenderness of her accents
+thrilling in his ear, Max remained obstinately dumb to Stephen
+Cranbrooke.
+
+"Forgive him; he is not himself!" pleaded Ethel, as she saw Cranbrooke
+about to go dejectedly out of the room.
+
+"Some day he will understand me," answered Stephen, with a gallant
+effort at self-control. Then, withdrawing, he murmured to himself:
+"But he will never know that, in playing with his edged tools, it is I
+who have got the death-blow."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Virginia Cousin & Bar Harbor Tales, by 
+Mrs Burton Harrison
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41591 ***