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Title: The Crime of Henry Vane: A Study with a Moral

Author: Frederic Jesup Stimson

Release date: January 14, 2022 [eBook #67164]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons

Credits: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by University of California libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIME OF HENRY VANE: A STUDY WITH A MORAL ***


  THE CRIME OF

  HENRY VANE

  A STUDY WITH A MORAL

  BY J. S. OF DALE

  _Author of "Guerndale"_

  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
  1884




  COPYRIGHT, 1884,

  BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

  Press of J. J. Little & Co.,

  Nos. 10 to 20 Astor Place, New York.




                                  THE
                         CRIME OF HENRY VANE.


"----Make a fool of yourself, like Vane."

"I am not so sure that is fair to Vane," said John; "no one can go
through what he did, and keep perfectly sound."

"I'll leave it to the crowd," said the Major; "what say you, boys?"

All were unanimous. There was no excuse for a crime like Vane's.
Evidently they all knew Vane. He was damned without one dissenting
voice.

"Who was Vane?" said I, "and what did he do? Which commandment did he
break? He must have made merry with them all--or, rather, have kept
them all to get such a judgment in this club."

A babel of voices arose. All these men were intimate friends; and they
were sitting in one of the small smoking-rooms of the Columbian Club
in New York. John had just engaged himself to be married, and we had
given him a dinner; or, as Pel Schuyler put it, we were "recording his
mortgage." Schuyler was a real-estate broker.

"Now, look here," said John, "how many of you fellows know Vane
personally?"

No one, apparently. There was a moment's silence. Then the Major spoke
up. "Bah!" said he, "I have heard the story these ten years." "So
have I!" chimed in several others. "My brother knew Vane in Paris,"
said Pel. "I had it from Mrs. Malgam herself," simpered Daisy Blake,
fatuously.

"Well, at least, I know nothing of it," I said; "tell it for my
benefit, John."

"Yes, yes," cried they, "let's hear the correct and only version
according to John."

It was that critical moment in a dinner, when the fireworks of
champagne have sputtered out, and the burgundy invites to somnolence.
All had lit their cigars, and felt more like listening than talking.
John did not smoke.

"I will," said he. "At that time, I was his best--I may say, his only
friend."

"And I say, still," said the Major, "he acted like a fool and
criminally. There can be no excuse for such conduct."

John shrugged his shoulders and began. Of course, I do not mean that
he told the whole story just as I have written it. He related the
bare facts, with little comment and without conversations. Whether
you condemned the man or excused him, John thought, his story might
be understood, even if his folly were not forgiven. The crowd at the
club did neither; and, perhaps, their judgment is the judgment of the
world; and the world is probably right. But we may learn from folly; it
is sometimes more suggestive than common sense. There is the ordinary
success and there is the exceptional failure; that is pleasanter, but
this is more instructive. Extreme cases fix the law.

The world is probably right; and, to those of us who are healthily
adapted to our environment, the world is enough. Blessed are they who
are fitted, for they shall survive. The world is enough; but the poet
sang, love is enough. Shall we say, love is surplusage? The world is
always right; and how virtuously the healthy world reproves what is
morbid! How all the world unites in condemning him who is not fully
content with itself! For such an one it cannot even spare its pity.
There is a kind of personal animus in its contempt.

Let us hasten to join our little voices to swell the universal song.
So John told the story--plainly and coldly, the more adversely for
the lingering doubt; so we tell the story, and the doubt lessens as
we state the facts, and quite vanishes as we reach the end. It is the
story of a common crime, and the criminal is no friend of ours, as he
was of John's. Moreover, Schuyler called the criminal a fool.




I.


IN April, 1873, Henry Vane was sitting on the _perron_ of a small
summer house in Brittany, poking the pebbles in the driveway with his
cane. He had been there for half an hour, and there was nothing in his
appearance and attitude to indicate that he would not be there for half
an hour more. There was one red pebble, in particular, which he had an
especial desire to prod out from among the others, which were gray.
But it was round and slippery, and slid about the ferruled end of his
cane. After poking it some time, he desisted and held the cane in his
hands in front of his knees, which, as the next step of the porch was
not much lower, were as high as his chin. "C'en est fait de moi," he
muttered.

Henry Vane, though a New Yorker, had been brought up in France, and in
the French language his thoughts came most readily. He had just seen,
for the last time, an old friend of his--a girl, whom he had known in
infancy, in childhood, in maidenhood; and whom it seemed incredible,
impossible, intolerable, that he should know no more. It was upon the
piazza of her uncle's house that he was sitting; and she was to leave
the next day for Switzerland.

He was of age that day, and was "his own man now." "And hers," he
thought, bitterly. She did not love him, however; and, at his request,
had just told him so.

"Décidément, c'en est fait de moi," he muttered again, and gave the
pebble a vicious dig, which sent it flying into an acacia bush that
stood in a green tub by the side of the driveway.

He was twenty-one that day, and had come into his fortune. His fortune
was not much--four thousand a year, left him by his grandmother and
invested in government bonds. Still, twenty thousand francs made him
distinctly a _rentier_; and twenty thousand francs seemed a good deal,
shared with the girl he loved. But it seemed very little for him alone;
genteel poverty in fact. He certainly could neither yacht nor race.
Travelling--except _en étudiant_--was equally out of the question.

Vane was a flippant young fellow, with a French education; fond of the
world, of which, as he then thought, he knew much. Yet the _Figaro_ and
the Bois de Boulogne and the _Palais-Royal_, or even the _Français_,
did not seem to satisfy him, that day. And all for a little "Mees
Anglaise!" How his friends would laugh at him! He was very young--they
would say; very young for a _grande passion_. And then they would laugh
again. But Vane felt sure that he should never get over it.

What the deuce did fellows do in his position? He felt a wild desire
for adventure and excitement; but excitement and adventure were
expensive; unless there happened to be a war, and you went officially.
But he had not many illusions of romance in war. He knew men who had
been at Woerth and Gravelotte. Then there was travel. But this, also,
was expensive. Old Prunier, the Professor, had made an expedition
through Soudan the year before, and it had cost him eight hundred
thousand francs. Moreover, you had to be up on rocks and beetles and
things, to make your trip of any use to the world. And Vane had not yet
given up all idea of being of use in the world. Besides, even Prunier's
expedition had not ended in much, except a row with the Portuguese
missionaries on the subject of the slave trade. These Christian slavers
had met Prunier's remonstrances with the plausible argument that it was
better for the negroes to be slaves in a Christian country, and save
their souls, than free on earth and damned when they died. Prunier had
consequently reported a crying need for a better article of missionary
in Central Africa. But Vane could not go as a missionary. He felt that
his confidence in Providence, at that moment, was not hardy enough to
bear transplanting into the native South African mind, through the
medium of a Turanian dialect.

He might seek the land of his nativity, and make his four thousand a
year, eight thousand. His father's business, for the moment, lay in
Bellefontaine. He did not in the least know where Bellefontaine was,
but the name had a civilized sound. And she was going to Switzerland.

Vane must have clenched his hands at this point; for he felt a decided
pricking in his left forefinger. And he observed several thorns on the
stem of the rose she had given him. For she had given him a rose. That
much favor had been shown him. He got into his mother's little phaeton
and drove home--with his rose. So far, his investments in life had not
been successful. The account with fortune might read somewhat like
this--Debtor, an English girl: to ten years' love and an indefinite
amount of devotion and sentiment. Creditor, by the English girl: one
rose (with thorns). That is, if he had put the Dr. and Cr. sides right.
He never could remember which was which. At all events, the returns
on his investment were not large. And he, with his uncertainty about
debtor and creditor, to think of competing with the practical Yankee
of Bellefontaine! No; he would leave his four thousand a year where
it was--a somewhat insignificant part of the national debt. Meantime,
what would become of him? What should he do? He felt an idle outsider's
curiosity to know what the deuce he _would_ do.

Of one thing he felt certain, his orbit in life would be highly
eccentric. He had no _raison d'être_; and it is difficult to predict
the direction taken by a body without _raison d'être_. The curve
of such a comet has no equation. He could no longer view life with
gravity; and it is quite impossible to calculate the orbit of a body
without gravity. He might bring up anywhere from Orion to the Great
Bear. Only one thing was certain--he could not, for the present, bring
up in Switzerland; and yet, oddly enough, that seemed to be the only
part of any possible terrestrial orbit that had an attraction. But
attraction decreases as the square of the distance. Assuming, for
the sake of argument, that he was now two miles from her, and loved
her with his whole heart; if he were twelve thousand miles away, he
would love her only one divided by the square of six thousand--only
one thirty-six-millionth part as much. In other words, he would have
thirty-five million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine thirty-six millionths of his heart left--left to bestow
upon the dusky beauties of the Pacific. Damn the dusky beauties of the
Pacific. He would see his sister Mary. After all, she was dearer to him
than the dusky beauties of the Pacific could possibly be.

When the boy arrived home, he drove to the stable, and alighting,
threw the reins to a groom. He was perfectly sure that his life was
broken; but a groom is a necessary adjunct of any life at all. He
rolled a cigarette and strolled toward the house, still holding the
rose, by the stem, between the first and second fingers of his left
hand. Momentarily his thoughts had wandered from the English girl; he
was still entirely busied in constructing a proper _dénouement_ for
himself. The romance of his life, he felt, was gone; but he desired
that his career should be consistent with his tragic part in life. She
had left him enough self-esteem for that.

So he entered the house.




II.


THE next few weeks seemed long enough to Vane; but, fortunately, we may
make them short. They must be told; they were part of his life; how
large a part, no one--possibly not even himself--ever knew.

When Vane entered the main door, which François, the old butler, did
not open for him as usual, he saw nothing of his mother. One or two
of her shawls were lying, as if hastily thrown off, on the carved oak
chair in the hall. The day was cool, and the embers of the morning
fire were still red in the chimneyplace. The cigarette did not satisfy
him; so he pulled out a cigar, and looking for a lighter, noticed a
yellow envelope near him, back downward on the floor; close by it was
a thin sheet of paper. Taking this, he was about to twist it up, when
he saw that it was a telegram. He opened it and read his name, and the
message, "_Mary is dead. Tell your mother for us. Pray, come directly.
Gresham._"

When the servants came in, they found him standing by the fireplace.
"Yes," they said to him, "Madame had left for Dieppe that morning. She
said nothing, but that Mr. Henry should follow her to England. François
had accompanied her. Mr. Henry would have the carriage immediately. But
surely Mr. Henry would dine before departing."

No; he would go directly. Thomas must pack his portmanteau. "And,
Thomas, lay out a black suit--all in black, you understand?" He would
take a glass of wine and a biscuit. "And, Thomas, all letters for any
one were to be forwarded to him at Sir Thomas Gresham's, The Eyotts,
Rushey, Lincolnshire. Stop; he would write the address on a card." So
he caught the evening mail from Rennes, and the night tidal steamer
from Dieppe. And the gray English fog at sunrise the next morning found
him off Newhaven, still pacing the deck.

Into the cloud of London at nine; out at ten, and flying through Essex
cornfields and Cambridgeshire fens. There had been heavy rains the
night before, and the country was soggy and saturated, with white
gleams of water over the land. The hay was swashing in the fields like
seaweed. Then the great church of Ely broke the horizon, and he changed
the train, finding an hour to wait. The little town was deserted; the
great towers seemed to weigh it down, to compel a solemn stillness. He
passed his time in the cathedral. At the end of the nave, just in front
of the eastern windows, is a beautiful reredos, a marvellous assemblage
of angels, saints and pinnacles. There is a central figure of Christ
among the apostles which had a strange attraction for him. He must have
been quite rapt in this; for the din of the noon-day bells reminded him
that his train left at twelve-fourteen.

At Rushey Station the carriage met him from the Eyotts, with Sir
Henry's footmen in mourning. The Greshams were all very fond of Mary.
He saw his mother as soon as he got to the house; but nothing was said
between them for a long time. "Mary is to be buried here," she began,
finally. "I think it better; better than any place out of America."
Then, after a pause: "I have not dared to telegraph your father. I
could not bear to have him know, all alone. He has not been well
lately, I know; and is anxious about his business. I wrote him that
Mary was ill, and begged him to come to France."

The Greshams were very kind, and all was done that could be done. Clara
Gresham seemed overcome with grief; she had loved Mary so dearly, and
her visit was to have been such a happy one. She was a quiet, rather
plain girl, but Vane found he could talk more easily with her than
with any one else. His mother and he said very little when they were
together.

One morning, at the breakfast table, Vane got a letter from America.
Some presentiment made him conceal it from his mother, and not open
it until he was alone. It was written in a tremulous hand, unlike
his father's, and told him they had lost everything. His father's
property, though large, was all involved in railways; and some panic
had intervened at a critical moment and all had been swept away. "My
poor boy," the letter went on, "even your own little fortune is gone.
Will you forgive me? You can bear it, I know, for you are young, and
can make your own way; and your mother has loved me long enough to live
with me these few last years in poverty; but when I think of Mary's
future, so different from what I had hoped, it breaks my heart. You
must give up the lease of Monrepos and come to America directly."

His mother divined bad news, immediately, and followed him, when he
left the room; but she seemed almost happy to hear it was only their
fortune they had lost, and not her husband. Her one idea was to
get back to him in America; but, to do that they must first return
to France. Their departure from the Greshams was hasty, and in the
afternoon they were on their way to Brittany. His mother seemed very
much broken; and he even feared for her mind at times. It was necessary
to interrupt the journey at London and Dover; and it was with a feeling
of relief that he found himself finally within the gates of home.

But Vane's life was to begin with a crushing succession of sorrows.
Mrs. Vane was impatient and nervous; and went hastily into the house
while he turned to give some directions about the luggage. As he
stood talking to the coachman, he heard a faint cry in the hall. He
went quickly in, and found his mother fainting, another fatal yellow
envelope beside her. It was a telegram from one of his father's friends
in New York, announcing his sudden death in that city.

It was with great difficulty that Mrs. Vane was brought back to
consciousness at all; and when she revived, she was delirious. Vane
knew nothing whatever about illness; but he carried her up-stairs
himself and then drove to Rennes for another doctor, leaving the local
practitioners in charge. It seemed so strange to be all alone, to have
charge of the family affairs, to have no one to consult with or rely
upon. But Mary, too, was dead.

So he drove into Rennes and brought a respectable old doctor, who
talked gracefully about nothings, and looked at him curiously and not
unkindly over his spectacles. He heard in a few words the story of his
mother's illness, but seemed more interested in Vane himself. "Ce beau
jeune homme," he said, tapping him playfully on the arm; "il ne faut
pas gâter tout ça!" The young man somewhat impatiently shook him off
and assured him that he was well. Arriving at the château, Dr. Kérouec
went at once to the sick-room, but stayed there barely five minutes.

Yes, one could save her life; he had seen that directly. But, for the
rest, he must get her at once to some place of security where she might
have treatment--it was her only chance. But Vane said No to this; not
until they were sure.

The next day she had recovered her strength, but was violently insane.
They lived in the château a month and there was no change. Then the
servants talked of going, and letters came from America telling Vane
how complete his father's ruin had been. He had been buried by his
friends in New York, as Vane had directed by telegraph. Vane could no
longer keep the château or even pay the household expenses. He must go
to America to see what he could save of his father's estate.

At the end of the month several physicians, most skilled in mental
disorders, had a consultation on his mother's case. The decision was
unanimous--she was incurable. Could she live? Yes, with proper care,
for years. Dr. Kérouec had a personal friend who made a specialty of
these cases and took charge of only two or three patients at a time.
Was this her only chance of getting well? Yes: if no chance could be
called a chance. It was not an ordinary _maison de santé_, and here she
would have the best of treatment, but it was expensive--fifteen hundred
francs a month. Could she bear the journey to America? Never. Vane
thanked the doctors and dismissed them all, except Dr. Kérouec.

That night, for many hours, the young man paced the courtyard under his
mother's window. At ten in the morning he asked to see the doctor and
found him breakfasting.

"I have decided," he said briefly. Dr. Kérouec extended his hand: "Ce
brave jeune homme!" The next evening his mother was safely installed
in the pretty little house near Rennes, where already Dr. Kérouec and
his friend had privately made preparations. "And, my boy," said Dr.
Kérouec (who was rich and knew all the circumstances by this time),
"it is customary to pay in advance only when my friend does not know
_ses gens_. I have told him that you will pay at the end of the year."
Vane's voice faltered as he thanked the doctor, but he produced a bank
note for five thousand francs and insisted upon leaving it then.

That night Dr. Kérouec saw Vane safely on board the St. Malo packet.
"I will care for her, my son," he said, with a parting pressure of the
hand. "Ce brave jeune homme," he muttered, as he walked ashore and up
the little Norman street, mopping his bald head (for it was a hot June
evening) with a large red silk handkerchief.




III.


VANE had six hundred francs left; and, taking the Holyhead mail, the
next evening he was on board the City of Richmond at Queenstown as
a steerage passenger. He had been troubled with no further thoughts
of adventure in the Soudan; and was quite indifferent as to his
own _dénouement_. He spent a great deal of the time at sea walking
on the deck; as a steerage passenger he was allowed to walk aft as
far as the foremast. The other steerage passengers looked upon him
as an intellectual young gentleman; probably a scholar in reduced
circumstances.

Eighteen thousand francs a year, Vane was thinking; this, at least, he
must have, for his mother could not be sent elsewhere. Gold was then
at a premium, and this sum meant four thousand a year in America. Just
the insignificant fortune he had lost; but could his labor be worth
so much? This problem had filled his mind, and kept his temper sane.
One who has to earn his bread has little time to sigh for things less
possible of attainment. The natural animal motive atones for any want
of others; no one is a pessimist who has to work for his living. The
young man smiled a little at the thought that he, too, was going to
America to seek his fortune--not to improve his future, but to amend
what remained of the past. This one obvious, clear duty was before him
then. Afterwards, he might see what the world had left for him.

One day about sunset he was sitting on the deck, reading a favorite
book of his--an old Florentine edition of Petrarca. As he turned the
leaves, a broken rose fell from them. It was a book which they--the
English girl and he--had often read together; and, having no Bible
(for, like all Frenchmen and many young men, he was rather a skeptic
in matters of religion), he had thrown her rose hastily between the
leaves. He was surprised a little, now, at his own want of sentiment.
But those times already seemed so far off! He looked at the flower
a moment; then picked it up, and dropped it in the sea. The leaves
scattered as it fell, and were soon lost in the broad wake of the
steamer.

Vane landed in New York among five hundred other steerage passengers.
Of course the papers did not take the trouble to report the coming
of so insignificant a person; nor did he call upon any of his social
acquaintances. His first visit was to his father's grave; then he went
to see, at their down-town offices, such of his father's business
friends and correspondents as he knew by name. He had written Mr.
Peyton--the one from whom the news had come--to suspend all decisive
steps until he came. Mr. Peyton--as indeed were all who had known his
father--was very kind; and told him the first thing to do was to get
appointed administrator of his father's estate. This being done, he
called a meeting of his father's creditors. Mr. Peyton had advised him
to offer a settlement of sixty cents on the dollar; but he did not
accept this suggestion. He told the creditors of Mr. Peyton's advice,
and added that he could probably pay at least seventy cents. But, he
continued, his desire was to pay in full. His only hope of so doing was
to be allowed to hold his father's investments for a time, manage them
judiciously, and avoid forced sales. Would they give him three years?

They were few in number, all capitalists, and co-operators with his
father; and they were pleased with something in the young man's manner.
All except one could easily spare the money; and to him Vane, with
the consent of the other creditors, gave his dividend of seventy per
cent., and received his acquittances in full. And that night the other
creditors, at a directors' dinner, agreed that, while they had done a
very foolish thing, they were anxious to see what young Vane would make
of it.

Young Vane took two small rooms in the oldest house of a down-town
street, for which he paid two dollars a week. And that autumn, Vane,
who a few months before had barely admitted that the name Bellefontaine
had a civilized sound, might have been seen riding on the cow-catcher
of a locomotive in Northern Wisconsin, and estimating the probable
earnings from freight when the forests about him were cut. When he
got his father's affairs into such shape that they could be managed
from New York, he procured a clerkship in a banking-house in that
city at six hundred dollars salary. And then for a year, his life was
monotonous routine without a day's rest. He rose at seven, prepared his
own breakfast of bread and fruit, and was at the bank before nine. He
lunched on a sandwich; left the bank at five, and walked to the Park
and back. At seven he dined on a steak and a pint of ale. And such
of his evenings as were not occupied with the care of his father's
estate, this practical young man of business gave, not to newspapers
and stock reports, but to mediæval history and Italian poetry. It
was his safety valve. He sometimes thought of writing a book on the
social and political history of the Florentine republic. He steadily
refused all invitations of his capitalist friends to dinner or other
entertainments. He could now live with two suits of clothes, and, to
accept their invitations, he would need three; moreover, he secretly
feared that he could not bear his present mode of life if he had even
a glimpse of any other. Only while alone could he forget that he was
alone in the world. John, who was in the same banking-house, was the
only man he knew; and many an evening John left a dinner, or was late
at a party, that he might sit for an hour in the little back room in
Washington Place.

At the end of the first year Vane took a week's vacation, walking in
the Catskills. Every week he had a letter from Rennes; and frequently
one from Dr. Kérouec, telling him of no change in his mother's
condition. When he returned from his vacation, he was called into the
counting-room of the senior partner, and given a check for four hundred
dollars in addition to his first year's salary of six hundred; and,
moreover, was promoted to a position of three thousand a year salary.
That first year, Vane had spent three hundred and eighty dollars in
board and lodging, and eighty more in pocket money. He had bought no
clothing, having brought all he needed from France. His travelling
expenses had been large, but these he had charged to the account of his
father's estate. This left him five hundred and forty dollars to the
good.

Vane then went to Mr. Peyton and borrowed three thousand dollars on
his own security. This three thousand he sent to Dr. Kérouec; and five
hundred dollars of his earnings he invested in a life-assurance policy
payable to Dr. Kérouec as trustee for his mother. He thus had forty
dollars in his pocket at the beginning of his second year.

By this time some of his father's railways were beginning to get out of
shallow water. Vane watched them carefully; and by judicious management
and successful sales, he was able, on the first of August, eighteen
hundred and seventy-six, the end of the three years allowed him, to
pay his father's creditors their claims in full--four hundred and
forty-seven thousand dollars, with interest for three years at six per
cent. And over and above this, after paying Mr. Peyton, he had sixteen
thousand dollars, which he might call his own. Early in August he
sailed for Brittany, and spent a week with Dr. Kérouec at Rennes.

His mother's hair was now white; she was quiet, but still hopelessly
insane, nor did she even recognize him.

Vane was back again on the first of September. When he presented
himself at the bank, he was offered a responsible position, and a
salary of six thousand dollars a year, with a hint of partnership in
the near future. He now removed to lodgings in Eighteenth Street; and
on going home that night, for the first time in two years he burst into
a fit of crying. This turn of hysterics was the prelude to a low fever,
of which he lay five weeks ill.




IV.


JOHN HAVILAND was with him a great deal of this time, and, on his
recovery, took him severely to task for the life he had been leading.
For three years he had been a mere machine--a blind, passionless,
purposeful energy. A man, and a young man, could not live like that.
What pleasure had he taken in all that time? And a young man, unless
he has attained happiness, cannot live entirely without pleasure, even
if it be true that he should not seek for it. And Haviland knew enough
of Vane's life to feel assured that there had not hitherto been much
happiness. Moreover, Vane was a man of the world, and had been out of
it for three years. It was unnatural. He should see something of the
people of his own country. His mother was well; and would probably be
the same for years. And he had been nearly three years in mourning.
"Now," John concluded, "I wish you to come to a dinner at our house on
Friday."

Vane smiled, and looked at his threadbare black suit--one of the
original black suits--which had seen much service since he brought it
over from France. But he pleasantly accepted John's invitation, and
forthwith visited his tailor. That afternoon, in the park, as he turned
to come home from his walk, and saw the walls and spires of his own
city harshly outlined before the sunset, he realized for the first time
that he was a stranger in a strange land. For the first time, as he
walked down Fifth Avenue, between the level, high wall of house fronts,
with their regular squares of lighted windows, he caught himself
wondering what was behind these windows. Now and then he saw a feminine
silhouette on the white window-shades; in some houses, even, he could
see into a lower room; there were usually pictures on the walls and
often books, or bindings, on the shelves; there was frequently an old
gentleman by the fireside, and always a young girl or two. It was
piquant to catch these glimpses of the domestic hearth from the street;
he remembered how impossible such visions were in the Faubourg, among
the old hotels between court and garden.

As he thought of the newly discovered country he was soon to enter,
so strange to him, he felt that he, also, was strange to himself.
He tried to bring back his old nature of the boulevards, Longchamp
and Trouville; but it seemed to him childish and obsolete; showy and
senseless, like a pasteboard suit of stage armor. He did not regret
it. He was a man and an American; men were earnest, life in America
was earnest. He knew little of his own city; but he had read the
current novels; and he thought that he had seen enough to know that
the every-day life in America was tangible, material, and the life
of society what it should be, a gay leisure, a surface of pleasure
and rest. Now, in Paris it was the every-day life that was trivial;
the theatres were filled with vaudevilles; but the tragedies were
everywhere, off the stage. It was well, the young man felt, that he was
an American; his life had begun too sternly for a more artificial state
of society; he lacked more than other people, and he demanded more from
the world.

So the Friday night in question found him arrayed in the normal evening
costume of modern times. It wore somewhat awkwardly and strangely at
first; and one or two little minutiæ of dress he did not know at all;
as, whether gentlemen in America would wear gold studs, and how they
tied their cravats. A waiter met him in the hall holding a plate, on
which were several little envelopes, one of which bore his name. I
suppose, thought he, in a country where there is no precedence, but
much formality, this indicates whom we are to take in to dinner. He
opened his envelope and found within a card, and written in a feminine
hand _Miss Baby Thomas_. What an intolerable name!

Coming above into the reception room, his first impressions were
decidedly favorable. John's mother was a comely woman of that
comfortable domestic sort known as motherly; she raised one's opinion
of human nature even by the way in which she sat down. The prevailing
tone seemed refined, Vane thought. No more bad taste was visible than
is unavoidable in a country where the head of a family dies in a
finer house than the one he was born in. The women were charming in
dress, and face and figure; but their voices were disagreeable, and
they seemed to him a little brusque. In fact, the men, though rather
awkward, seemed to have more social importance, if not better breeding.

So far had he progressed in his studies, when a voice over his shoulder
said, "Miss Thomas--Mr. Vane." Inferring that he was being presented,
he turned quickly about, bowing as he did so. The young lady did not
wait for him to begin, but at once rattled off a number of questions
about himself and his foreign life. As the most of these she answered
herself with an "I suppose," or a "but of course," Vane had leisure
to observe her while she talked. She was pretty; admirably, sweetly
pretty; there was no doubt of that; as pretty as masses of dead-black
hair and eyes of intense gentian blue could make her. She had a lovely
neck and hands; and a smile which seemed placed there with a divine
foreknowledge of kisses. It was at once infantine, arch and gentle;
and then there was a pretty little toss of the head and a shrug of
the white, young shoulders. Vane looked at her curiously, a little
condescendingly perhaps, as the first specimen of the natives he had
seen. She did not seem to mind his looking at her. If a French girl
had so calmly borne his glance, there would have been a little of the
coquette in hers. But, after all, thought Vane,--this was charming;
more ideal, more intelligent, sweeter than Paris--but it was not unlike
Paris. The dress was certainly Parisian. She was better dressed than
young ladies are in Paris. Her people must be very rich. Yet, he was
disappointed. She was not American enough. She would have been quite in
his mood of five years gone by. She was not like English girls; and he
had hoped American girls were like them.

Vane had just finished this process of mentally ticketing her off, when
she grew silent. The first quick rush of her conversation was gone.
She seemed to be getting her breath and waiting for him. He did not
quite know how to begin. This young lady reminded him of a glass of
champagne. When you first pour it out, there is a froth and sparkle;
then a stillness comes; if you wish a fresh volume of sparkles, you
must drop something into it. A piece of sugar is best. Vane's French
breeding stood him in good stead: he began with a compliment.

After the dinner, the nine ladies disappeared from the room; and the
nine men grouped themselves at one end of the table and smoked cigars
over the sweetmeats. When the room was well filled with tobacco-smoke,
they threw open the doors, and returned to the drawing-room. The ladies
were grouped about, picturesquely, drinking tea; and the air was
delicate with their presence. As the body of men moved in, it seemed a
little like an incursion of the Huns into Italy.

The party kept together but a few moments more. Most of the men were
sleepy; little was said by the women. It was as if there were nothing
to talk about, or as if the men had eaten too much; but they had eaten
very little. Vane was relieved when they got out of doors.

John walked back to his lodgings with him. The two young men found no
lack of things to talk about. Haviland took still another cigar. "What
did you think of the dinner?" said he finally. "I mean, the people?"

"I thought it was very pleasant," said Vane, eluding the second form of
the question. But Haviland recurred to it.

"I mean the people. Miss Thomas, for instance."

"Miss Thomas, for instance," said the stranger. "I think," he
continued, recalling to mind his mental label, "she is sweet-tempered,
innocent, ambitious, and shallow." Vane had formerly prided himself on
some acquaintance with women of the world.

John laughed. "Perhaps you are right," he said. "But she will amuse
you, and wake you up." It seemed as if he were remembering something;
then he laughed again. "You do not do her justice yet. She is one of
the most entertaining and, in an innocent little way, exciting girls I
know. I put her next you for that purpose."

"Who is her father?"

"Oh, a stockbroker down-town. No one in particular. The family would
not interest you."

"None of the mammas were here to-night?"

"Dear me, no," answered John. "Why do you ask?"

"I should like to see some of them; that is all."




V.


AT this time Vane was not in the habit of thinking about women. He had
found life particularly serious, and girls were not serious. Somewhat
fatuously, perhaps, he fancied no woman under thirty could either
understand him, or arouse his own interest. And most of the women over
thirty were married. He understood that in America any intimacy with
married women was out of the question; married women were quite given
up to domestic duties, and kept out of society.

But Vane had certain theories of his own as to social observances,
and he thought it his duty, after taking Miss Thomas in to dinner,
to call upon her. He performed this duty (which afterwards became a
pleasure) upon the following afternoon. He found her in a somewhat
dingy house on East Fifteenth Street, but, though the setting was dull
and commonplace, herself was even prettier than he remembered her, and
simply and charmingly dressed. Vane was no amateur of bric-à-brac; he
had no auctioneer's eye, and, if a room was in perfect taste, did not
commonly notice it at all; but glaring faults would force themselves
upon him, and he could not help observing that, with the exception of
the daughter's dress, the household showed no evidence of knowledge of
what is good in literature, art, or taste.

Except Miss Thomas. Always except Miss Thomas herself. She received
him with much grace of manner, but seemed to have very little to say.
Vane found that he had to talk largely against time; and this rather
disappointed him at first. At first, but afterwards he decided that
he liked this still mood best. There was no dimple and sparkle, but
it was quiet and companionable. She is not like "a young lady," Vane
thought; still less like a French young lady. She is neither _ingénue_
nor _formée_; she is young, bright, a good fellow. One might play Paul
to her Francesca without a _dénouement_. How could he have thought her
ill-trained? Though she had evidently thought little, read less, and
been taught nothing at all, she had a sweet natural elegance of her
own. Vane found time to observe all this between his sentences. They
were not very well connected.

Was he going to Mrs. Roster's ball? she had asked.--No, he thought not.
He did not know her.--He had better go. Every one would be there.

"Then I fear I am no one," said Vane. "I am not even invited." He was
sorry to fancy that her interest in him flagged a little after this.
She had met him at a good house, but, after all, he might be a mere
protégé of John Haviland's. Mr. Haviland was always picking up queer
people. A moment after this Vane took his leave.

Why should he not go to Mrs. Roster's? he said to himself. He could
not always be brooding on the addled eggs of the past. After all, the
world was all that was left him, and in the world the dance still went
on merrily, and maidens' eyes were bright; leaves still were green, and
the foam of the sea as white as ever, and wine still sparkled in the
glass. He said this to himself with a somewhat sceptical grin, for,
like most Frenchmen with whom he had lived, he took little pleasure in
drinking. A Frenchman drinks to go to the devil: he rarely goes to the
devil because he drinks. Yet he was, or at all events he had been, fond
of society. He had liked light and gay faces, and bright conversation,
and heartlessness--if there must be heartlessness--masked under suave
manners and intellectual sympathy. Out of society the heartlessness
was just as real, he had used to think, only ruder; there is at least
as much snobbishness, and it is more offensively vulgar. He could not
stay always out from all society. He must find something to pull him
back into the world; he must get some grip of life. Hitherto his only
foothold had been his clear necessity of making eighteen thousand
francs a year to send to his mother.

He could probably have persuaded himself with much less reasoning if
he had not had a secret inclination to go; but, as it was, he reasoned
himself into it, and thought that he thought it was a bore. So he went
to Mrs. Roster's ball. Of course he admired the beauty of American
women; the beauty of American women is like the Hudson River; one
is bound to prefer it to the Rhine. He thought the party was very
pretty and the dancing beautifully done, and, moreover, he made the
acquaintance of several young ladies of quite a different type than
Miss Thomas's. They had plenty of breeding and intelligence, and talked
the latest slang of culture to perfection, and were evidently of the
great world, if they had not quite so much charm as she. Still none of
these, as yet, were essentially American, or even very deeply English,
though they dabbled in it.

Miss Thomas herself, for some reason unknown to Vane, did not receive
quite so much attention as he had fancied that she would. It was not
her fault, for she was charmingly dressed and never looked prettier.

As he was ready to leave he met her, for the first time, coming down
the stairs in wraps and wanting her carriage.

"You have not spoken to me the whole evening," said she softly, as she
took his arm.

"I was afraid to, mademoiselle," said Vane, half jocosely.

"Come to-morrow," she whispered seriously. "It is my day for receiving,
and I shall be so glad to see you." Vane bowed his thanks, and the next
moments were occupied in conveying herself and skirts safely into the
coupé. As he was about to shut the door she extended her hand frankly:
"You will come, won't you?" Vane was a little puzzled; he took her hand
awkwardly, and muttered something about being only too delighted. He
had no experience whatever of American women, much less American girls.
Why should she so particularly wish to see him? He called the next
day, expecting to learn, but in that he was doomed to disappointment.
Apparently Miss Thomas, if she had any reason, had forgotten it;
she had very little to say, and the call was quite conventional and
commonplace. "Bah!" he thought, as he walked home. "Here I have wasted
half an afternoon over this girl simply because she asked me. Doubtless
she herself had nothing better to do than waste it over me." And
perhaps he added secretly that his life was something more serious than
hers, and, at all events, he had no mind for light flirtation.




VI.


NEVERTHELESS, some curious chance made him see a good deal of Miss
Thomas. He was very apt to sit next her at dinner, even if he did not
take her in. And whatever she might be, she certainly was not silly.
She said very little, it is true; but it occurred to Vane one day that
what she did say never placed her in a false or foolish position. Nor
had he ever made a remark which she did not fully understand, in its
full bearing and implication. Sometimes she affected--particularly if
its nature was complimentary--to be wholly unconscious of its meaning;
sometimes she would even ask an explanation. But a moment after, she
was very apt to say or do some little thing which showed that she had
understood it perfectly. Vane, who, in his flippant moods, was rather
an adept at conversational fencing, and had flattered himself that very
careful ground was quite unnecessary with Miss Thomas, gradually put
more attention into his guard and more care in his attack. And when he
saw, to continue his own metaphor, that his simple thrusts in quarte
and tierce were easily parried and sometimes returned, he began to
honor his adversary with a more elaborate attack. But, as he one day
acknowledged to himself, though she had rarely touched him, yet he was
not sure that he had ever got fairly under her own guard. Altogether,
the more he saw of Miss Thomas, the more she interested him; and after
the serious struggles of the day, he quite enjoyed his little playful
evening encounters with so charming a feminine adversary. For he began
to admit to himself that she was charming--there was no doubt of that.
And meantime (so he fancied) the intercourse with her happy, simple
nature was having a beneficial influence on his own.

For the past three years his attitude had been one of stern courage,
of self-renunciation. But, after all, why should even he be always
shut out from the spring? Flowers still bloomed in the world, summer
followed winter, and this pretty little butterfly that fluttered near
him might, after all, bring him healthier thoughts from her own air
than he found in his morbid life. What a sharp inquisitor is one's own
self! What a cross-examiner of hidden motive! And what a still sharper
witness is that self under inquisition! Vane never took his young
friend seriously; and felt a need of excusing himself for trifling, as
he thought.

John suddenly asked him, one day, what he thought of Miss Thomas now,
and whether he had changed his views at all. "I was very much struck
with your first diagnosis," he said. "At a moment's study, you gave the
popular opinion of her; that she was gay, shallow, good-humored, and
ambitious--and you might have added clever, rather than innocent."

Vane was a little displeased.

"I think that I and the world were wrong," said he. "She is not
shallow, but she is humble rather than vain; as for ambition, she is
perhaps too much without it; and I should not be surprised if somewhere
about her pretty little self she had a true woman's heart, which she is
not yet conscious of."

John laughed. "Look out, old man," said he; "only a poet is allowed to
fall in love with his own creation. Never say I have not given you fair
warning. Ten Eyck was very attentive to her at one time; and the world
believed that she wanted to marry him. But he was appointed _chargé
d'affaires_ at London; and left her without bringing matters to an
issue. Since then, when he has been back in New York once or twice, he
has entirely dropped her."

"And do you mean to say that she still cares for him after that?"

"So the world thinks; and the world is apt to be right in such matters."

"Bah!" said Vane. "No woman could care for a man who had once led her
to believe he loved her, and left her."

"Humph!" answered John. "That may be true of woman in the abstract; but
I am not sure of its truth in this longitude. It is easier to judge
woman in general than a New York girl in particular."

"At all events," said Vane, "I give her full leave to try her skill on
me, skilful as you say she is. Indeed, if you think she is fair game
for what you call a flirtation, you have removed my only scruples."

"Very well, old boy--go in. But Miss Thomas once told another girl that
she could understand any man in two days' acquaintance. Don't go in too
deep."

"Nonsense!" thought Vane when John had left. "I flatter myself I am
beyond her hurting. It is pleasant enough to have her as a friend. I
wish I could wish to marry her." And he called to his mind Brittany and
that last rose. "But I am sorry if she really can still care for that
man. Ten Eyck was his name? I should be sorry to like her less. How
strange these American women are! Now, in France--Bah!" he broke off,
"it can't be true; and, after all, what do I care if it is?"

Vane liked her very much, and thought her very much underrated by the
world; and the same afternoon, by way of vindication, he went to her
house and made a long call, _tête-à-tête_. He had fallen into an easy
companionship with her, which made her society a delightful rest and
respite from the earnest stress and strain of his life, of any man's
life. They were beginning to have numerous little confidences as to
people and things; views shared by them only, which gave them little
private topics of conversation, nooks of thought, where they met. Thus
Vane could quite shut out a third party from the conversation, and keep
Miss Thomas to himself. Her cultivation and taste surprised him more
and more as he knew her. This pretty little New York girl, naturally
half-spoiled and petted, brought up in a particularly _bourgeois_
household, never having been out of it and New York, had yet a range
of mind and appreciation quite equal to anything he could bring her
in books or in conversation. The people about her seemed totally
different--different in views, in taste, in appearance, in manner. Yet
she never seemed discontented at home--a common fault of children in
a country where they improve upon their parents. She moved among them
modestly and lovingly, like a princess unconscious of her royalty. All
this thought Vane, and marvelled.

He found that even his peculiar tastes were shared. It has been
mentioned that this successful young business man had a secret taste
for Italian poetry. This he had been used to indulge alone; but on his
mentioning it, she spoke with enthusiasm of the sweet old mediæval
_terza rima_. Having little opinion of women's power of purely ideal
enjoyment, he had at first doubted the sincerity of this taste. Still,
he brought around some old verses one day; and soon it became his
habit, instead of reading alone, to pass an evening or two in a week
reading with her. And so during the winter, with double the pleasure he
had ever known before, they went through the familiar pages of Ariosto,
Tasso and Dante. The fifth canto of the Inferno remained, however, her
favorite; and with the light of her eyes upon the text Vane made a much
better translation than Byron or Cary ever dreamed. She was never tired
of hearing the passage beginning "Siede la terra dove nata fui." And
much practice in translation makes perfect.

Thus, thanks to Miss Thomas and a little sight of the lighter rim of
life, Vane passed a winter which, if not happy, was at least less
bitter than he had known for years. In the natural course of events,
society pronounced him attentive to Miss Thomas; but Vane cared little
for that. His character was not of the mould which cares what the world
says. He did not believe that her life was very happy, either; and he
thought they were both the better for their friendship. The more he saw
of her, the less he doubted that she had at one time cared for some
one, Ten Eyck or another; though, of course, for him she would never
care again. After all, she was his superior; she had kept her sweet
self above her sorrow, he had not. How he had misinterpreted her that
first evening! Now he saw she was a woman, in all the glory of her
womanhood, strong, gentle, and true.

Vane went back to Brittany in the June of the summer following. One of
his last calls was upon Miss Thomas, and she chided him with not making
it the very last. However, the call lasted three hours. Twenty times
Vane rose to go, and each time was detained by some pretext or another
of Miss Thomas. There is a sweet pleading manner of urging a wish,
even a selfish one, that makes you feel as if you were doing yourself
a favor in gratifying it. Miss Thomas had this manner, which few men,
particularly strong men, can resist. Vane always yielded. He would as
soon have thought of putting a pet canary through the manual of arms
as of resisting it. In this way Vane's visit was prolonged, and when
he went home he admitted to himself that it had been a very charming
one. He thought she was a lovely woman, and wished some nice fellow
would marry her. What a gentle, sunny nature she had! And what a lovely
type of the best American women, so different both from the French
and English, so natural, so pure, and yet so bright and charming. "At
least," thought Vane, "if I ever go back to France to live I shall
have seen some things wholly worthy of admiration in my own country."
He was sorry if she really cared (as she had seemed to) that he had
called upon her two days before his departure. She had been very kind
to him that winter, and it certainly would have been more _empressé_ to
have called upon her last. Vane stopped on his way to Jersey City the
morning of the steamer's sailing, and procured a superb mass of roses.
These he sent to Miss Thomas with his card: "From her sincere friend."
It was the last thing he did in America.




VII.


VANE stayed with old Dr. Kérouec in Rennes, and found the good
physician kinder than ever. He always called Vane "my son" now, and
he had to submit to numerous embraces, a proceeding he did not like,
for in his manners Vane had that clumsiness in expressing anything
emotional, that Gothic phlegm, about which Saxons grow vainglorious,
and for which Celts detest them.

Every day Vane walked in the garden with his mother--a painful duty,
for she never remembered him. Her dementia was quite harmless now, and
she sometimes spoke to Vane of himself, not knowing him, but never
mentioned his father. Curiously enough her talk was much of Mary, and
of the English girl who had been the object of his boyish affections.
Vane heard casually of her marriage that summer, and was more surprised
than pleased to find how little the news affected him.

Once in a while, however, he caught himself wondering what Miss Thomas
was doing; and a week after his arrival he received a note from her to
thank him for the flowers he had sent. She also said that they were at
some place in Pennsylvania for the summer, far from the madding crowd,
but she found the place very stupid and the people inane. There was
nothing to do there. The men were all young Philadelphians, she wrote,
and generally uninteresting. Vane was glad to get the note, and of
course never thought of replying.

At this time Vane was a handsome, erect fellow, with a large aquiline
nose, and heavy eyebrows shading quiet eyes. Most of the people knew
him well as the doctor's protégé. One day the good old doctor came to
him with an air of much mysterious importance. He passed Vane's arm
through his, and led him to his favorite walk up and down the garden.
"My son," he began, tapping him on the shoulder, and beginning in a way
he evidently thought to be diplomatic, "you are growing older, and it
is not good for you to be alone. Listen! it is time you should marry."

Vane looked up quickly, and then struggled to repress a smile.

"Listen, my child," continued the doctor, much pleased, "I have to
propose a _parti_ of the most charming--but of the most charming! My
wife's own cousin and two hundred thousand livres of _dot_! What say
you?"

Vane was touched, and found it hard to answer.

"My child," the old man went on, "I love you like my own son--my
own son, see you? You are not noble _de naissance--mais, le
cœur--d'ailleurs_, neither are you _rôturier, non plus_. I have spoken
of you to Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-aigue, and Madame la Comtesse
_veut bien_. Her daughter is charming--but a child adorable! You will
let me present you _comme futur_--what say you?"

Vane bent over and took the hand of his old friend. "My father," he
said, "I would do more for you than for any one living. You have been
more than a father to me. God bless you for it! But this I cannot do. I
shall never marry." Vane spoke seriously and with some tragic effect,
like a Manfred or a Werther.

The old man sighed deeply. He knew Vane too well to press the matter.
"Ah!" said he, "you say you will never marry. I know better. You have
seen some American--_quelque petite Américaine rusée_. _Hélas!_ and we
might all have been so happy." The doctor said no more on the subject,
but was sad and quiet during the rest of Vane's visit.

He said nothing afterwards, except on Vane's departure. Then he
pressed his hand: "Ah, consider, my child. A young girl of the most
charming--of the _most_ charming--and two hundred thousand livres of
_dot_!" Vane could only press his hand in return. And the last he saw
of the doctor, he was standing still upon the Dieppe pier, rubbing his
nose with an immense silk pocket-handkerchief.

This was Vane's fifth trip across the Atlantic; and for the first time,
he felt glad when the vessel's prow turned westward. Brittany, for him,
represented the past; America the future. He was an American, after
all. A day after his arrival he would be immersed in Wall Street--up in
all the mysteries of exchange and rates, the stock-list his breviary
and the ribbon of telegraph paper his oracle. Meanwhile, however, he
dozed on the deck and essayed metrical translations of Boccaccio. He
was reading the tale of the pot of basil one day, and thought for about
half a morning of Miss Thomas. What she had to do with his reading, he
could not see. But she was quite the most interesting figure in his
mental gallery. A curious jumble was this modern state of society.
Bare flowers sprang up in strange parterres; exotics grew outside
of hot-houses, and common whiteweed inside. There ought to be some
method of social transplanting; some way of grafting new blossoms on
an old stock. But all American stock was good; American society was
like a world of rounded pebbles grating on a beach; the buried pebbles
were quite as fine as those on top; only these were more stirred and
polished, so their colors came out best. And yet what common, poor
stuff most of them were, after all! A pleasant trade, that of social
lapidary! And Vane, perhaps for the first time, took note of the
women around him. There was a Philadelphia girl, pretty and voluble;
there was a young lady from Michigan, who had been to "college" in
Massachusetts and finished herself abroad, alone, or in company with a
dear friend from Connecticut. There was a girl from Cleveland, wealthy,
marvellous, indescribable; and a young lady from New Orleans, with
all the fire drawn from her cheeks into her eyes. There was a girl--a
young woman, a young lady--a being feminine, from Boston, weighing and
analyzing all things within her somewhat narrow mental horizon; and
a social entity from New York, also of the feminine variety, but of
orbit predicable and conventional eccentricities, her life a function
of two variables, money and fashion. All these women were fair, and
strange to him; and this, perhaps, was the only day of his life that he
had definitely considered women from a contemporary point of view. His
assured income was now eight thousand a year. Four of this went to his
mother, three he spent; the rest he saved.

Coming back to New York, he plunged into a mass of accumulated
duties; it was a week before he found time to see anything of John;
and two weeks before he called on Miss Thomas. He found her in a
rather different mood than usual; a little sadder, a shade more
self-conscious. "It is two weeks before you come to see me, and you did
not answer my letter," she said.

Vane could only bow. "If I had only known you wished me to," he said.

"Ah, well! And what have you seen abroad?"

"Nothing of interest to me now."

"And what are you going to do this winter?"

"I do not know. Stick to my trade," Vane added laughingly.

"And shall we not go on with our reading?"

"I should be only too happy."

"What a conventional expression of willingness--what an enthusiastic
acceptance!"

"Conventions are the safest expressions of the truth."

"What do you mean by 'safest'?"

"The safest to me."

She gave a little laugh, in which Vane joined. "I do not understand
you."

"You mean you are too skilful a fencer to admit it."

"What do you mean by 'fencing'?"

"The manner of our conversations."

"You mean that it is not sincere--that it is badinage? Why do you do
it, then?"

"I am only too ready to change our ground."

"I do not know what you mean."

Vane bowed his disbelief in this remark and rose to go.

"Ah! do not go yet. I am so lonely to-day, and it is just the hour of
the day when there is nothing to do. I have no work and my poor eyes
are too weak to read. They are not even useful!"

"Why do you imply they are not ornamental? Why do you say what you do
not mean?"

"But I do mean it."

"You know you have lovely eyes."

"I thought you never made compliments," she said with a little pleased
laugh.

"You see your weak eyes are strong enough to keep me here." And rising
to go, he extended his hand.

"Ah! do not go yet." And taking his hand, she almost detained it
gently. "I am so glad to see you once more."

Vane laughed again. "Have you read De Musset's '_Il faut qu'une porte
soit ouverte ou fermée_'?"

"No; but I will read it. Why?"

"Because my calls resemble that one. I am continually opening the door
to go. Now if my call could have the same ending!" he added gallantly.

She colored. "She has read it," thought Vane. "_Halte-là!_" And this
time, perhaps rather precipitately, he took his leave for good. Miss
Thomas gave another of her little pleased laughs, after he had closed
the door. Vane had been thoroughly amused, and walked in a very
contented frame of mind to John's. Coming into his smoking-room, he
took a cigar and threw himself at full length upon the lounge. He could
afford occasionally to smoke and take life easily now; it was different
with him from the times, three years back, when he used to get his own
breakfast in the little rooms on Washington Place.

"Well, old man, how goes it?" said John, looking up with a light of
friendship in his gray eyes which Vane's coming always brought to them.

"Capitally! I have been passing the afternoon with Miss Thomas."

"And how was she? Fascinating as ever?"

"_Fascinating_ is not the word I like to use of her. It implies
conscious effort."

Vane was evidently off on a thesis, and Haviland settled himself on
the sofa with a pipe. "I have seen many women whom the world calls
fascinating, and they never attracted me at all. We look, admire and
pass on. Now, Miss Thomas has all the brightness of a woman of the
world, with the simplicity of a country maiden. If she has any charm,
it is because she is just herself, as Nature made her." Vane spoke with
the air of a knight defending abandoned beauty.

"By the way (if you have finished your essay on an inamorata), I saw
Ten Eyck to-day. He has come back from London, with a chance of being
ambassador to Madrid, and is a better match than ever."

"Ten Eyck? Who is Ten Eyck? Oh! I remember. Well, and what of it?" Vane
added, after a pause.

"Oh! nothing, nothing at all. He is the son of one of our New York
Senators, you know; and has a brilliant future before him."

"Bah! The most brilliant future a woman can have is a future with a man
who loves her."

"And where did you pick up that aphorism? Not from your French
education, surely? I believe Miss Thomas loves him."

"I may not be up in American ideas, John, owing to the French education
you sneer at; but I certainly was brought up to resent a remark like
that, made of a young girl I like."

"I don't see what there is insulting in saying that a woman--for she
is a woman, as you yourself admit--loves a man. I think it rather
a compliment. American women rarely do, I can assure you. Their
natures are like a New England spring--the sun must do a devilish
deal of wooing before even so much as a green tendril is visible."
And Haviland, who was just then devoted to the young lady of Puritan
descent whom he has since married, fetched a deep sigh.

Vane began to laugh again.

"Well, well. In time, I, too, shall become a New Yorker. And by the
way, John, speaking of that--is it customary here to invite a young
lady to go to walk with you?"

"Why, certainly, if you like. Miss Thomas has gone many a time, I
fancy."

"I was not thinking of Miss Thomas," said Vane, pettishly.




VIII.


VANE had not intended to go to Mrs. Roster's ball the next night; but
he went, nevertheless. Vane was always a rather cynical spectator at
large parties in New York. Somehow, it was so different from all that
he had hoped; it was so like Paris, with more frivolity and fewer
social gifts. A cynic is commonly a snubbed sentimentalist, who takes
it out in growling. Vane had sought the world because he was lonely;
but it seemed to him more than ever that he was much less lonely when
alone. It is isolation, not loneliness, that saddens a man of sense;
for his sense tells him that it is the world which is likely to be
right, and proves him a solitary fool.

This evening Vane did devote himself to Miss Thomas; and a charming
conversation they had. "You are quite different from what I thought you
were," she said. "I used to think you were serious and queer."

"Really," said Vane; "and what do you think me now?"

"At least, I do not think you serious and queer. Certainly, not
_serious_."

"But I am."

"Can that be?" There was a heightened color in her cheek.

"As you see me. Will you go to walk with me next Sunday afternoon?"

Miss Thomas looked up suddenly with her soft eyes; then as suddenly
cast them down again. Vane must have seen that she blushed a little.

"Yes." And then, "if you do not leave Fifth Avenue," she added.

"After that I shall certainly ask you to go into the Park," he said.

"You had better not--at least not before the Sunday afternoon--or I
will not go with you at all," laughed Miss Baby, roguishly.

Vane bent and took her hand for a moment; as it hung among the orange
leaves in the conservatory. Then he bowed and left her without an
apology. She did not draw her hand away; and as Vane looked back at
her from the door she was, this time, blushing violently. Vane himself
walked home in a somewhat agitated frame of mind, and went to sleep;
and when he woke up in the morning, he discovered that he was very much
in love with Baby Thomas. This discovery caused him more surprise than
disapproval; and yet he felt bound to confess himself a good deal of a
fool.

He thought of it several times during the day, in the intervals of
business, and not without considerable mental invective. However, as he
walked home in the afternoon, he became less out of humor with himself.
She certainly was a very charming girl, and well worth winning. At all
events it was pleasant to be in love with her. He expected to see her
that evening, and the prospect gave him a great deal of happiness,
not without a slight seasoning of excitement, that made quite a novel
enjoyment in his life. Certainly, he reflected, he was very much in
love. It was surprising how it had grown in the night--like Jack and
his bean-stalk. However, he saw no particular reason why he should try
to cut it down. Perhaps he secretly doubted whether he could do so if
he chose; and the doubt was agreeable.

Miss Thomas was not at the party that evening; and Vane found himself
a little uneasy in consequence. He left early, and went to see John
Haviland.

"John," said he, "I am in love with Miss Thomas."

"Many of us have been through that," said John, calmly; "it is not
fatal."

"But," said Vane, "my constitution may be more delicate. I am not a
hide-bound rhinoceros."

"Neither," said John, "am I." And he defended the aspersion upon his
epidermis with a quadrupedal sigh.

"But I want to marry her."

"That is also a symptom. You need not do it, however."

"What do you know against her?"

"Nothing; but Ten Eyck has rather too heavy a prior mortgage."

"I don't care for Ten Eyck."

"The question is, whether she does."

"I know very well that she can't."

"She would hardly wish you to know the opposite, if the opposite were
true."

"Bah! I know something about women----"

"The devil himself can't know a woman who doesn't know herself."

"Anyhow, it is a free field----"

"And plenty of favor."

"She hasn't seen Ten Eyck for years----"

"The last time was this afternoon."

"What?"

"I saw them walking on Fourth Avenue, as I came up-town in a horse-car."

"Humph!" said Vane, and he dropped the conversation.

For some weeks he said nothing more to John about Miss Thomas; and
during that time he was trying, with more or less success, to persuade
himself of his own folly. But he found it more easy to bend his
energies to the subjugation of Miss Thomas's heart than of his own.
And John noticed that he left his business rather earlier in the
afternoon than usual, and always took the Fourth Avenue car up-town.
In his evenings he exhausted a large part of the most cynical French
literature in convincing himself that he was a fool. But in spite of
Balzac and Scribe, he found that he looked forward anxiously to the
evenings when he was to meet her; and it was more easy for him to laugh
at his own infatuation--no, interest was the name he gave it--than to
go for a couple of days without seeing its object.

The first Sunday that he let pass without a visit, he was very nervous
all the evening, and going to bed early made a vain effort to sleep.
What a--qualified--fool he was, and yet how he did love that girl! He
got up and read Heine by way of disillusion, and opened the book at the
quatrain,

  "Wer zum ersten Male liebt
  Sei's auch glücklos, ist ein Gott;
  Aber wer zum zweiten Male
  Glücklos liebt, Der ist ein Narr."

How good! How very good! And Vane laid the book down with much applause.

Decidedly the best way to win Miss Thomas was to give her her own
way. He could leave her to her own devices for a time. If she loved
Ten Eyck, there was nothing to be done by seeing her; if she did not,
a little delay would do no harm. If she loved nobody, his chance was
assured.

This settled, Vane went to bed with the easy mind of a general who has
planned the morning's march.




IX.


VANE'S strategy was doubtless perfect; but in the morning he found a
note sealed and superscribed in a charmingly pretty feminine hand.
"Dear Mr. Vane," it began, "Miss Roster's skating party has been
given up. She begged me to tell you; but, as I have not seen you, I
feel obliged to send you this note. If you have nothing better to do,
why will not you come that evening? It is so long since we have read
together.--Winifred Thomas."

"Now," thought Vane, "why should Miss Roster send word to him by Miss
Thomas?" He felt that he could not be positively rude, so at eight in
the evening he presented himself. Miss Thomas was apparently alone in
the house. She was sitting in the parlor, with no light but that of
the fire, into which she was looking with her deep blue eyes; her face
was pale, except that one cheek was rosy with the heat, imperfectly
screened from the flame with her fan. She received Vane coldly; he drew
up a chair, noticing, as he did so, her foot, which was covered only
with a slipper and a thin web of open-work black stocking, and was very
pretty.

Miss Thomas seemed _distraite_ and depressed; he had never seen her in
that mood before, and sought in vain to draw her into conversation. She
answered only in monosyllables and still looked dreamily into the fire.
Vane felt as if he had unwittingly offended her. Finally, just as he
rose to go--

"Why are you so strange to-night?"

"I--I?" stammered Vane.

"Yes." She lifted her small head and looked full at him. It seemed
as if there was a tear lost somewhere in the depth of her eyes. Vane
became conscious that he was a brute, and thought for the first time,
odd as it may seem, of the walk which he had asked her to take the
Sunday before. He had forgotten the walk entirely.

"I had suddenly to go to Pittsburg." This was true; but he had returned
on the Saturday. And yet he felt that he must say something, if only to
suppress his growing inclination to take her hand in his.

"What do you mean?" said she wonderingly. They were both sitting; Vane
staring at her helplessly.

"Why, when I broke our engagement to go to walk----" Truly he was
floundering more than ever.

"Oh! were we engaged to go to walk?"

A pretty mess he had made of it indeed.

"I am only too glad you have forgotten," he said; and then rising, with
an awkward bow, he got himself and his shattered reputation for _savoir
faire_ out of the room. After putting on his overcoat, he turned back
to the threshold of the parlor. "Will you go to walk next Sunday?" he
asked bluntly.

"I must go to church that afternoon. I am so sorry."

Vane bowed again, and took his departure more piqued than he was
willing to acknowledge. As he went down the steps he heard a few chords
upon the piano. It was the beginning of the love-song from Francesca
da Rimini. After all, he thought, why should he be offended? She had
behaved just as he should have wished her to. He could hardly expect
her to acknowledge that she had waited for him in vain. How pretty she
had looked in the firelight!

The next Sunday, about sunset, as he and John were returning from a
long walk in the country, two figures came out of a small church on
Sixth Avenue, well known for the excellence of its music. Miss Thomas
was one, the other John recognized as Ten Eyck. She did not seem to
see them, but the two walked rapidly ahead of them the length of the
block, and then turned down a side street. Vane pretended to be wholly
unconscious of the scene. John alone gave a grunt of surprise. And for
two weeks or more Vane treated Miss Thomas with alternate neglect and
familiarity when he met her in society; the former when he found it
possible to avoid her, the latter when he was necessarily thrown with
her. One night at a german she gave him a favor. Vane, after dancing
with her, felt obliged, in common politeness, to talk with her for a
few moments. He sought refuge in that sort of clumsy pleasantry which
our English models have taught us to call chaff; she said nothing, but
looked at him wonderingly, with large troubled eyes. She seemed as if
grieved at his manner and too proud to reproach him with it. Could she
really love the man? thought Vane. How could she? He felt as if the
suspicion did her an injury. Vane's heart melted to her as he came
home that night. He had mentally judged her as he would have judged a
woman in one of his cynical French comedies. He had treated her like
a character in a seventeenth century memoir. And how much above such
judgment was this sweet American girl! She was fond of her friends, and
true to them, and frank to him, so that he saw that she cared for him.
What did she know of the world, or of older societies, or the women in
his wicked French memoirs? She lived in new, pure, honest America; not
in the chronicles of the _Œil-de-bœuf_. And Vane felt that the best
amends he could make was to ask her to become his wife. When he hinted
this intention to Haviland that philosopher, for the first and only
time in his life, improvised a couplet:

  "Jamais la femme ne varie,
  Bien fol est toujours qui s'y fie."

Having got off this gâtha, John retired to his pipe, and became, like a
Hindoo god, impassive, ugly, and impenetrable.




X.


FOR some weeks Vane rested satisfied with the conclusions arrived at in
the last chapter. It was so satisfactory to have made such a resolve;
and besides, there was no cause for hastening the event. There was
singularly little impulse in his inclination. Most certainly, he meant
to put his fate to the test; but not at point-blank range. Vane was
cool enough to proceed warily; and he still clung sufficiently to the
precepts of his French authorities in matters feminine to know better
than that. For a repulse always puts the garrison on its guard, and
doubles the difficulty of investment; and a woman's heart should be
taken by siege, not assault. Other supplies should be cut off; and
then the citadel be undermined and sapped in a quiet way. The attacker
should imply boundless admiration, without actually committing himself
to a more particular sentiment--flirtation from behind earthworks--and
so, without being exposed to rebuff, gradually surround her with such
an atmosphere of incense that at last it becomes indispensable to her;
and, after one or two futile sallies, she falls before his arms. This
is the wisdom of the serpent; but Vane knew that it was never wasted
on a woman, however sweet and dovelike; if you wish her to take your
attentions seriously, you should make her think they are not serious.
And if Vane was willing to marry, he had no mind to be refused. When
Vane expounded these theories to John, the latter seemed relieved.

A lover in New York is at no loss for opportunities to win, if he has
leisure to woo; but Vane suffered many chances to pass by without
improving them. Perhaps he was dissatisfied with his love, with
himself, with his life as he found it; he remembered, like all boys,
trying to live as if he were the hero of a novel; now it was altogether
too difficult not to live like the hero of a comedy. Vane abhorred the
eighteenth century, and all its belongings; but it seemed to him that
the world around him, and himself as part of it, were subjects apter to
a Congreve than a Homer.

All the more, he sought to wind his affections around their object;
he would not admit to himself that there was something wanting even
in her. But the winter was nearly over before he resolved to take any
decisive step; and Miss Thomas had been growing prettier every day.
Mrs. Levison Gower was to give a sleigh-ride. They were to drive in a
procession of single sleighs, and stop at some one's country house for
an hour's skating. This opportunity would be most propitious; and Vane
decided that Miss Baby Thomas should be his companion.

Miss Thomas seemed really very sorry. Vane admitted this afterwards,
when he sought to reason himself out of his consequent ill-humor. But
she was already engaged to ride that day in Mr. Wemyss's sleigh. It
was so unfortunate, and she was so much disappointed! Vane, however,
decided to postpone his proposal of marriage to some other occasion;
so he drove out sedately with the young and beautiful chaperone. With
her he made no sufficient effort at flirtation, and Mrs. Gower never
forgave him the omission.

The ice was very good; and Vane was disporting himself meditatively in
one corner of the pond when Miss Thomas whirled by him on the "outer
edge." Miss Thomas was a beautiful skater; and, as she passed, she
stretched out a crooked cane as if inviting him to join her. Vane had
no desire to refuse; and in a minute the two were rolling along in
strong, sweeping curves, the girl's blue eyes gleaming with excitement
beneath their long black lashes. Her eyes had the still, violet blue
of a cleft in a glacier; Vane could not help looking into them once or
twice. The ice was broken.

Neither of them had much to say; but for an hour or more they skated
together. The crooked stick, proving too long, was soon discarded; and
they skated hand in hand. On the shore, Wemyss was devoting himself to
the matron. He could not skate.

Finally, the signal of recall was given. Miss Thomas made no movement
in the direction of the return, and Vane was naturally too polite to
make the first. They could see Mrs. Gower at the other end of the pond,
skurrying about, like a young hen after her chickens. Suddenly Miss
Thomas discovered that they ought to go back; but when they returned
to the shore they were the last of the party, and had the log, which
served the purpose of a seat, to themselves. Vane stooped to take off
his companion's skates, and in shaking them free Miss Thomas brought
the blade of one across his hand with some force, causing a slight
scratch on the back of his finger. She gave a little cry of horror, and
then, as the finger bled profusely, pulled out her own handkerchief,
and, before Vane could prevent her, bound it around the wound.

"It was my fault," said she. "You can give the handkerchief to me when
we next meet."

As they walked back, Vane, dropping behind, unwound the handkerchief
and put it in an inside pocket, then drew his glove hastily over the
scratch, which had already stopped bleeding.

Going home, Mrs. Gower found Vane much more interesting. The heat of
the noon had melted the snow, so that the sleighing was not good,
and it was dusk before they got into the city. But when Vane left
Mrs. Gower's house for his own dinner, the sleigh which contained
Miss Thomas had not returned, though Wemyss was there, having driven
back with Miss Bellamy. Coming to his rooms, Vane unfolded the little
handkerchief and kissed it; and that night, when he went to sleep, it
was in his hand beneath the pillow. In the morning, he looked at it.
It was a cheap little thing enough, made of pieces of linen or muslin
stuff, looking like dolls' clothes sewed together, but giving the
effect of lace at a distance.

Vane went to a store on Broadway and purchased a handkerchief of the
same size, of old point lace, and the same afternoon called upon Miss
Thomas. "I have brought you your handkerchief," said he, giving her
the one he had bought, folded up. "I am very much obliged to you for
lending to me."

Miss Thomas took it, looked at it for a moment, then at him and thanked
him. "It was of no consequence," said she. "It was an old one." Vane
went home, much excited, perhaps a trifle disturbed in mind. Such a
rapid victory had hardly been foreseen by him. She had taken from him,
as a present, a valuable bit of lace; which must certainly mean that
she would take him, if he offered himself. And he was not quite sure,
now that the prospect was so near, that he really wished to marry Miss
Baby Thomas. He liked her immensely, and she certainly amused him more
than any other girl he knew; but he was not quite sure that he wished
to marry--at all. Now that the prize was within his reach, he shrank
back a little from plucking it. Four years ago, in Brittany, Vane had
felt himself an old man; but now it seemed that he was "ower young to
marry yet." These thoughts gave him much trouble; and in the meantime
he abstained from further complication by not calling on Miss Thomas,
and, at the same time, subjected himself to much self-analysis. Could
he honestly be content to go through life with this girl by his side?
He knew enough of life to know that it mattered very little how often a
man made a fool of himself, if he did not do so on the day when he got
married. Now Miss Thomas was certainly a very nice, sweet girl--but did
he love her enough to marry her? The outcome of his deliberation was in
the affirmative; but--another but.

Ten days had elapsed since he gave her the handkerchief, when finally,
one Sunday afternoon, he called to see her. He half expected that he
should ask her to marry him. But he did not do so. When the call was
nearly over, she excused herself for a moment, and, going up-stairs,
returned with the handkerchief in her hand. "You have brought back the
wrong handkerchief," said she. Vane started with a shock of surprise he
could not repress.

"I--I brought the wrong one?" he said awkwardly.

"Yes."

"It was the one you gave me."

"Oh, no! it was not. This one is real lace."

"The--the washerwoman must have made a mistake."

Miss Thomas said nothing.

"You must keep it all the same, Miss Thomas."

"I cannot keep what belongs to other people," said she unappreciatively.

Vane bit his lips. "I--I will make it right with the washerwoman," said
he clumsily.

Miss Thomas's look was more hopelessly unsympathetic than ever; and,
folding the bit of lace, she laid it on the table by his elbow.

"The fact is," Vane went on, with a pretended burst of confidence, "the
one you lent me was ruined: so I did get this one instead. Please take
it."

"It is much more valuable than mine," said she coldly.

"Please take it," said Vane again, with the iteration of a school-boy.

Miss Thomas began to take offence.

"How can you expect me to do such a thing?" said she, rising as if to
dismiss him. Evidently a bold push was necessary. He took the bit of
lace and threw it quickly into the open fire, counting on the feminine
instinct which would not suffer her to see old lace destroyed. With a
little cry, Miss Thomas bent down and pulled it from the coals.

"Let it burn," said he, rising and putting on his gloves. "If you do
not want it, I am sure I do not." And he silently refused to take the
handkerchief, pretending to busy his hands with his hat and cane.
"Good-by," said he.

"Good-by," replied Miss Thomas, coldly, laying the handkerchief back on
the centre-table.

When Vane got to the hall he looked at her a moment in turning to open
the front door. She was standing before the fire with a heightened
color in her face, whether of a blush or anger he could not tell.




XI.


VANE went home much discontented with himself. He had not only behaved
like an ass, but he had made a blunder. He had gone much further than
he meant to in seeking not to go so far. And he found that he loved
her more than he thought, now that he had displeased her. He wanted
diversion that night, and did not know what to do. Miss Thomas was his
usual diversion. John was away. Finally, after dinner, he happened into
Wallack's theatre--it was the interval between the first and second
acts. The first person that he saw was Miss Thomas, and a young man in
evening dress was seated next her. Vane paid little attention to the
play, and at the end of the second act he went out without speaking to
her.

This was simply incredible! Vane could not conceive of it. It was a
pitch of innocence beyond the range of imagination of a man educated
in France. This was America with a vengeance. It must be that she
did not care what people said. Could she know that bets were made at
the club upon the state of her own affections and the sincerity of
her admirers? Vane was much offended. He was angry with her for her
own sake. At first he thought he would go and tell her so; then he
reflected that the affair of the handkerchief would put him in rather a
false position, and, after all, she was not worth the trouble. For the
present, at least, he would not go near her.

The next night Vane went to a "german" at Mrs. Haviland's. Miss Thomas
was there dancing with Mr. Wemyss. She received him very pleasantly.
He danced with her once or twice, and then sat down beside her, Wemyss
not coming back. Miss Thomas was dressed in a white, cloudy dress, with
sprays of violet and smilax. A wreath of the green vine was in her
black hair, and she had a large bouquet of the violets in her hand,
nearly the color of her eyes. The dress was cut low to a point in front
and behind, showing the superb poise of her small head upon her neck.
Whoever had sent her flowers must have known what her dress was to be,
or he could not have sent her the violets to match.

When Vane left, he had made an appointment for a walk the next fine
afternoon. She had said nothing about the handkerchief. Vane feared,
every morning, to find the parcel containing it at his rooms, but it
was not sent back. He was encouraged by this, and began to make excuses
to himself for her being at the theatre. This still gave him much
anxiety, and he half decided that he would speak to her about it.

At last there came a fine day for the walk, and Vane called at
her house at four. He had also called one day before, but she had
complained that it was too cloudy and looked like rain. This day he
found her ready. They went up Fifth Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street;
then he persuaded her to go into the park. She fascinated him that
afternoon. There was something peculiarly feminine about Miss Thomas.
Although her hair was black, it was not coarse and lustrous, but
very fine and soft, dead black in color. A soft, creamy dress hung
lovingly about her figure. She talked much about herself in a sisterly
sort of way. Vane felt a desire to protect her. She had a gentle way
of yielding, of trusting to him, of allowing him to persuade her to
continue the walk. They sat down a moment on a wooden bench among some
seringa-bushes; above them were the branches of an oak just leafing
out, swaying in the wind and casting changing flecks of light and shade
upon the gravel path and the folds of her gown. There were soft lights
in her face, and her eyes were like two blue gentians.

"Miss Thomas, I have a question to ask you," began Vane, suddenly. "You
will promise not to be offended?"

"Yes," said she innocently, opening her eyes wider.

"Are you engaged to be married?"

"No," said she almost instantly, as if without reflecting. Then she
blushed violently, and silently rose to go home.




XII.


VANE wished himself at the bottom of the lake, if that ornamental piece
of water were deep enough to drown. It seemed like one of those foolish
things one does in a nightmare, without being able to prevent it. Now
first he saw how impossible it was to go on and talk to her--to preach
a sermon to her--as he had thought he intended. It would mortally
offend her if she were not mortally offended already. What right had he
to criticise her conduct, particularly when criticism would certainly
imply disapproval? With all his reproach came a glow of satisfaction.
She was certainly not in love with any one, she had answered so
instantly. Then with this thought came the sting again that he had
wounded her.

"I--I saw you at the theatre the other night."

Miss Thomas remained silent.

"Were you not at the theatre with Mr. Ten Eyck?" persisted Vane.

"I was at the theatre with my brother," replied Miss Thomas, icily.
"Mr. Ten Eyck sat in his seat for a few moments, I believe. Will you
stop that car, if you please, it is getting so late."

Vane did so with an ill grace. He had counted on the walk home to alter
her impressions, and now this opportunity was lost. They took seats and
sat for several blocks in silence. Vane looked at her covertly, and saw
that the flush of indignation had given place to pallor, and that she
looked grieved. He could have wrung his own neck.

Coming finally to her door, he felt that he must say something. He
stood a moment on the stoop. Then, "Miss Thomas, please forgive me," he
said gravely. She hesitated a moment.

"Are you offended?" he added, for the sake of something to say. "Pray
forgive me. I had a reason for asking, and an excuse."

"I might forgive you," she said, with her hand on the door, "but it
would have been better for you not to have said it." She opened the
door and went into the house, leaving Vane on the threshold with a
distinct impression that she was going to cry.

He walked along, mechanically, in the direction of his rooms, feeling
his cheeks burn. That he had bungled--that he had committed a social
gaucherie, he knew well enough; but what troubled him more than this
was that he had given her real cause for offence, he had hurt her. If
she could only know what pain this thought brought to him! Fool that he
was, he had worn his clumsy, jejune mask of cynicism, and had not once
shown to her his truer self. He was more at fault than the world was;
and she was not of the world, and he had blamed her for it.

He stopped on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street,
half-way down the hill, and looked at his watch. It was nearly six.
He did not wish to go back to his rooms; he had no engagement that
evening. As he stood irresolute, he took off his hat to Mrs. Gower,
who passed by in her carriage. Then he resolved to go down to his
office and work that evening, as was his habit when he wished to banish
from his mind a too persistent thought. He walked back through the
cross-street, to get the railway on Sixth Avenue, and still thinking
how Miss Thomas was probably crying over his rudeness, locked in her
own room. How _could_ he have done it! As he approached her house, he
felt almost tempted to go in again; but the front door opened slowly,
and, after a momentary pause, he saw Ten Eyck come out, walk down the
steps and rapidly away. Vane grew very angry with himself and her;
until he reflected that she could not possibly have known that Ten Eyck
was coming that afternoon. And, indeed, he probably had not been let in.

None the less did Vane work savagely through the evening, taking a
lonely dinner at the "down-town" Delmonico's. At about midnight he left
his office and walked all the way up to his room, smoking, and thinking
what he could do to win Miss Thomas's forgiveness. The gas was burning
low in his study, and he saw a square white packet among the letters
lying on his table. He felt that shuddering weakness in the loins, as
if all within were turned to water, which he had learned to recognize
as the work of that first apprehension of a serious misfortune which
comes a moment before the mind has fully grasped it. He sank upon
the sofa with a long breath, and looked at the letter silently for
several minutes. It was a neat note, beautifully sealed and delicately
addressed; like all her notes, bearing no evidence of a servant's dirty
pocket. He opened it, fearing to find in it the lace handkerchief
without a word; but no, there was a note with it:

    "MY DEAR MR. VANE--

   "I send you back your handkerchief. It is still a little burned; but
   perhaps you can make some use of it. I ought to have returned it
   sooner, but was having it mended.

             "Sincerely yours,
                              "WINIFRED THOMAS."

So! thought Vane; it was all over now. He had bungled it shamefully.




XIII.


HE went to sleep as soon as he could--which was not very soon; and woke
up, with a sob, from a dream in which they were both very miserable.
It was an hour earlier than his usual time for rising, and, as he went
into the park, the birds were singing quite as they might have sung in
the country.

On considering her note critically, he did not think it so hopeless
as it had seemed in the night. And again he repaired to his office.
Business was very good at this time, and Vane was rapidly becoming rich.

He waited many days for a chance to speak to her; and finally the
chance arrived, at an evening party. Curiously enough, he was more
afraid of her in a simple morning frock, worn in her own house, with
the little edging of white lace around the throat, than in evening
dress, in all the splendor of her woman's beauty. He did not like her
so well with bare neck, and bare arms, and a sweeping cloud of white
about her, and white satin slippers. She was more like the other women
one could meet in the world. She looked at him coldly; but none the
less did he determine to speak to her. Her partner left her at once;
and Vane led her into the embrasure of a window.

"I want you to forgive me my question of the other afternoon."

Miss Thomas made no answer.

"You would, if you knew my excuse."

"I don't see what possible excuse there can be," she said, gravely.

"There is one--and the best of all excuses," he added, in a lower tone.

"I do not understand you."

"Are you sure?" said Vane, with a low laugh.

She met his eyes, calmly, for an appreciable duration of time. "I wish
you would tell me what it is," she went on seriously.

"Some time, perhaps, I will."

"Why not now?"

Vane shook his head. "I will tell you when you take back the
handkerchief."

"I shall never take back the handkerchief."

"You do not know how persistent I am. I shall ask you every week until
you do."

Miss Thomas slightly moved her shoulders. He could have fallen at her
feet then and there. It was dark behind the curtain, all except her
eyes, and she looked at him almost tenderly, and made no effort to end
the conversation. Vane felt that he was very deeply in love with her.

"Do you really wish to know the reason why I asked you that question?"
he said, hastily. "Do you ask me now?"

"Perhaps I shall ask you some time," she said, dropping her eyes.

Vane bit his lip, and clenched his fingers, which had been dangerously
near hers. At first he did not know what to reply.

"As for the handkerchief, you shall surely take it some time. I will
give it to you when you are married."

She blushed deeply. "Thank you," she said, "I would rather have a new
one, then. But it is time for me to go home--or--I think I should like
an ice first. Will you get me one?"

When Vane returned, two or three men were about her. She took the ice,
but, after tasting it, put it aside indifferently. "I really think I
must be going now," she said, giving her arm to one of her companions.

Vane was determined not to be outdone, so he went to find her carriage,
and had the pleasure of shutting the door himself; the two other men
standing by. "Good night," said he, in a low tone. She made no reply
until he had got back to the sidewalk; then, "Good night, every one!"
she called out as the horses sprang away, restive with the cold. Vane
went back to the supper-room to get a glass of champagne, and then
walked home.

After this, he decided to leave the course of events with her. He had
surely told her, as plainly as a man could tell a woman, that he loved
her. He had also told her that he would ask her to marry him whenever
she wished--whenever she would forgive him a rude question for which
his love was the best possible excuse. So two months passed without his
speaking to her seriously. But he felt well assured that he loved her.




XIV.


ONE day in June, Vane sat in his office with two notes open on the desk
before him. One was from Mrs. Levison Gower, inviting him to make one
of a moonlight picnic party. They were to be conveyed up the Hudson
in Mr. Gower's steam-launch, land just above Yonkers, take possession
of a grove, and have dinner there for no other reason than that they
might dine with much more convenience and propriety on the deck of the
yacht. The other note before Vane was from Dr. Kérouec, in Brittany,
announcing a serious change in the condition of his mother.

He had already decided to take the next steamer for Havre. He had been
making his preparations all the day; but for some reason had postponed
answering Mrs. Gower's note. And now he was face to face with a strong
desire to see Miss Thomas once more before he went away. And, after
all, why should he not go? His mother had been ill for so many years,
and he felt that she would still be ill for so many years more; and
Mrs. Gower's party was to be the day before the departure of his
steamer. He knew that Miss Thomas would be there. He had quite decided
not to call at her house again; he had not called there for the last
two months; but he longed for a glimpse of her face to take away with
him. It might be so long before he came back, and so many things might
happen while he was gone.

Miss Thomas was the first person Vane saw, standing by the entrance, as
he went on board the yacht. She was evidently looking for some one; but
when she saw Vane, she turned away. Vane kept up a rapid conversation
with his hostess until a lady arrived whom he knew, when he walked with
her to the other side of the yacht. Meantime he could see that Miss
Thomas was covertly watching his movements, and talking with no one.
Her eyes seemed to follow him wherever he went; but he was careful not
to get within speaking distance.

After many delays, caused by languid guests, late hampers, and the
vacillations of Mrs. Gower herself, the little steamer cast off and
proceeded up the river. Mrs. Gower took command in the yacht, extending
her jurisdiction, as Vane observed, quite to the limit of the pilot's
politeness. At first, owing to the smells of the manufacturing
establishments which lined the river, and divers distasteful sights
about the wharves, but little attention was paid to the scenery; but
when the city was left behind, and the western shore grew bolder,
Nature was rewarded with all the adjectives of feminine enthusiasm.
Vane heard less of this, however, as conversation grew more general.
When due appreciation of the Hudson's beauties had been shown, the
company broke up into groups of two or three camp-stools, and every
little clump fell to discussing its neighbors. Here and there was a
group of two--a male and female--oblivious of neighbors and discussing
each other. The Palisades looked on in silence. It seemed to Vane that
the occasion was only saved from insignificance by the presence of Miss
Thomas.

When they touched shore at the grove appointed for the picnic, most
of the ladies and gentlemen, eager to land as if it had been an ocean
voyage, crowded to the gangway. Mrs. Gower felt it her duty to show the
way, and skilfully forced a passage through her guests, Vane, who was
at that moment busied with the duty of protecting her, following in
her wake. Her rapid motion caused a sort of eddy in which Vane moved
behind her without much effort; so that, looking about him, he saw Miss
Thomas beside him. Her companion was a young man with an eye-glass,
looking like a student in college, the consciousness of his own merits
continually at war with the world's estimate of them; so that the
unceasing struggle of a proper self-assertion left him little breath
for words. In one of the pauses of his conversation, Miss Thomas turned
rapidly to Vane.

"Are you never going to speak to me again?"

"Have you forgiven me yet?"

This little interchange of questions was so quick that it hardly could
have been noticed by any one. Miss Thomas turned back to her companion
before he had even time to miss her attention; and indeed his mind
was fully occupied in grappling for his next remark; while Vane was
incontinently swept over the gang-plank in the vortex of Mrs. Gower.

She certainly looked very pretty that day, thought Vane, as he walked
up the hill with the latter lady; but he was sure now that he had no
mind to be refused by her. Better even the present than that. She had
on another soft, clinging dress, of ivory white, which only lent an
added charm to her skin of whiter ivory, the dead black hair, and those
wonderful violet--"Ah--oh, yes," said Vane to Mrs. Gower; and then,
seeing this lady laugh, "Yes, very funny--hah!"

"I was telling you of Mrs. Grayling's sad experience in Rome," said
Mrs. Gower, demurely; "but I fear you were not thinking of her."

Vane vowed to keep a tighter rein on his thoughts thereafter; and they
came to a little glade in the wood, where the servants were laying
table-cloths on the turf. The dinner was very gay. Some ladies screamed
when a daddy-longlegs ran into the lobster salad, but an occasional
pine-needle, falling into a glass of champagne, seemed but to add to
its flavor. It was considered _de rigueur_ to sit upon the grass;
but most of the men found it very awkward to assume attitudes of any
decorative value, and the college student in particular was heard to
wonder audibly how the deuce the Romans did it. After the feast, the
company divided itself into couples and scattered in the woods. Miss
Thomas did not leave the table; and Mrs. Gower felt obliged to wait for
the last. Wemyss stayed with her. As Vane passed behind Miss Thomas,
she called him to her.

"I have something to tell you to-day."

"Will not some other time do?" said Vane, "I am getting a glass of
wine for Mrs. Gower." The girl looked at him, but did not seem to take
offence.

"I may never tell you, if I do not tell you to-day," she answered,
seriously, in a low voice. Vane looked at her surprised; she bore his
gaze for half a second, and then let her own eyes drop. The student was
looking on with parted lips. "Oh, Mr. Bronson," said she, immediately,
"I wish you would get me a glass of champagne--and seltzer, too!" She
said the "too" with an inflection that made it sound like _do_.

The youth departed on his errand; and Vane also left, saying that
he would be back in a moment; but he was saved a double journey by
observing that some one else had brought Mrs. Gower her wine and had
taken his seat beside her. Vane returned to Miss Thomas, passing
rapidly over in his mind what had happened in the four months since he
had asked her that fatal question, and trying to decide upon a course
of action for himself. She had made no effort to have him speak to her
before to-day. But by her presence the picnic was quite saved from
insignificance.

"I have come back, Miss Thomas," he said, seriously. "What can you have
to tell me?"

Miss Thomas looked at the tent, before which Bronson was
standing--waiting for her seltzer. Most of the guests had left the
place, and the servants were clearing away the dinner. The moon was
just rising.

"Will you not come for a walk?" said Vane. Miss Thomas gave him her
hand, and he helped her to her feet. "I am forgetting your wine," he
said, afterwards. He was ill at ease and nervous.

"You know that I never drink wine at parties," she answered; and just
as Bronson came back to the place where she had been sitting, they
disappeared in the forest. Bronson had a long neck supported by a very
stiff standing collar, and when his dignity was compromised he had a
way of throwing back his head and resting his chin upon the points of
his collar. He did this now, and the Adam's apple in his throat worked
prominently. Then, after looking gravely a moment at the seat which had
been Miss Thomas's, as if to be satisfied that she had really gone, he
drank the champagne himself and went back to the tent, where he found a
male acquaintance, to whom he proposed a smoke. "It is such a relief to
get away for a minute from the women," he murmured, as he threw himself
on the grass and rolled a cigarette. "By the way, did you see that
little girl I was with? Nice dress, you know--quiet little thing. Well,
by gad, sir, I believe there's something up between her and that fellow
Vane."




XV.


AFTER they left the place of the dinner, Miss Thomas walked on for some
time in silence, and Vane had inwardly resolved not to be the first to
break their peace of mind. The woods, being part of a private estate,
had received some care. There was no underbrush, and they were walking
in a well-kept path. The moon was now high enough to make a play of
light among the leafage and to outline with a silver tracery the smooth
twigs and trunks of the trees before them.

Vane was silently wondering what Miss Thomas could mean. He became
strangely self-possessed and cautious, and it occurred to him that this
was the sort of clear-sightedness a man would have who was gambling
and playing for a very large amount. He thought to himself that this
was just the way fellows usually got married. Vane had been brought up
to suppose that the proper way to reach a young lady's heart, or at
least her hand, was through the judgment of her parents; but, somehow,
this did not seem to be necessary in New York, certainly not with Miss
Thomas; and he felt that there was a danger of his asking Miss Thomas,
to-night, to become Mrs. Vane. And, after all, he felt to-night that it
was by no means certain that he wished Mrs. Vane to have been Miss Baby
Thomas.

The long silence became embarrassing, but Vane did not quite know what
to say, and Miss Thomas had apparently no desire to say anything. The
path they were in led up to a low stone wall in a sort of clearing on
the side of the hill, with a distant view of the Hudson. Vane assisted
Miss Thomas over the wall, and then, getting over it himself, sat down
upon it. The girl sat down beside him. Both looked at the river.

"What did you have to say to me?" said Vane, at last.

"I wished to tell you that I had forgiven your question," Miss Thomas
answered in a low, quiet voice, looking away from him across the water.

"Entirely?"

"Entirely, from the heart."

Vane certainly did have a thrill of pleasurable excitement at this
speech. It was the sort of glow, the tingling feeling about the waist
he had felt when about to mount a strange horse whose temper he had
not tested. He looked at the girl. She was half sitting, half leaning,
against the wall. Her flowing dress had caught the sheen of the moon,
and the white figure shone brightly against the dark leaves. She might
have been a naiad or a wood-nymph, and yet there was a subtle feminine
presence about her. With some girls you can associate on terms of
fellowship, make companions of them, perhaps even sit on the fence in
the moonlight and talk to them amicably, as to another man. But you
could never forget that Miss Thomas was a woman.

"I was really very much hurt," she said, "and I think you ought to have
begged my pardon."

"I did," said Vane, "and I told you I had the best possible excuse."

"But you never told me what the excuse was." The young man sat on a
lower stone than hers, and, as he looked up to her, the radiance fell
full upon her face, and he saw the moon reflected in her eyes.

Why should he doubt this girl? Had he not been deeply in love with her?
And, after all, had she not borne herself, in all their relations,
as he would have wished her to, as he would have wished her to be,
supposing that she cared for him? She had often been right in being
offended with him, but she was too gentle to be long angry--she was
lovely in forgiving. Had he not plainly let her know what should be the
signal for him to declare his love? Was not this as much encouragement
as any woman would give? Strangely enough, now that he was sure of her
he almost doubted of himself.

"Do you really ask me to tell you of my excuse?" said Vane, and he felt
a little ashamed of himself for the prevaricating question. "Do you not
know?"

Miss Thomas said nothing, but made a slight motion of her dress. Vane
bit his lip, and felt that this was cowardly. The moon had gone into
a cloud, but he fancied, from the position of her head, that she was
looking at him with her large eyes. Her dress seemed to have a light of
its own, which made her form still visible in the darkness. Suddenly he
pictured to himself the way his conduct would look to her if she really
cared for him, and he felt sure that she did, and he knew that she
attracted him more than any woman he had ever met.

"Because I love you, Winifred," said Vane, and he laid his hand on hers.

"Oh--h," sighed the girl with a sort of shudder, as if he had given her
pain, "I am so sorry." Vane caught his breath. "Oh, I am so sorry!"
Vane pressed her little hand convulsively. "Oh, I never thought it was
this. Why did you tell me? Why did you not leave it unsaid? Now I shall
lose you for always." Her voice broke in a sob.

"Do you mean that you will not marry me? Do you mean that you do not
love me? You must know how I have loved you." Vane covered her hand
with kisses. Miss Thomas seemed to be unconscious of this, but went on
in a sort of cry, asking him to forgive her. "Do you mean that there is
no hope?" said he, gravely.

"Oh, no! none. You know how much I like you, but I can never marry
you. You will forget all this, will you not?" There was a long silence
between them, but her hand still lay in his. Meantime the sky had grown
black in front of them. Vane was straining his eyes to see her face.
There was a flash of lightning, and he saw that her cheek was wet with
tears. Some large drops of rain came pattering down among the leaves.

"We must hurry back," said Vane suddenly, dropping her hand. She rose
silently and followed him along the path. In a few moments they got
back to the place of supper. They were the first to arrive, but in a
moment they heard voices in the shrubbery.

"You will try and forget this evening, will you not?" said Miss Thomas,
hurriedly. "Try and be as if it had never happened. And oh, tell me,
are you very unhappy?"

"I am very sorry," said he, "but I am going to-morrow to France."
Miss Thomas made a movement of surprise, but there was no time for
more to be said, as the thunderstorm was really upon them, and every
one was hastening to the river. On the boat Vane found Miss Thomas a
seat, and then went alone to the bow. He was very unhappy. He had not
fancied that he would be so unhappy. He was very much disappointed,
and, perhaps, a little angry. Coming up from the wharf in New York he
was, as a matter of course, put in the same carriage with Miss Thomas.
There were two other people with them, and Vane endeavored to act light
comedy, but was not well seconded by the girl herself, who was silent
and very pale. They went to Mrs. Gower's house for supper, but all the
women were wet, and most of the men ill-tempered, and the party broke
up early. Vane took his leave at once, and went back to his lodgings
to finish his packing for the voyage. As soon as he had done he went
immediately to bed and fell asleep late in the night, having as a
latest waking thought the consciousness that he had for many months
been making a fool of himself.




XVI.


THIS was still the most marked flavor in his self-consciousness the
next morning, and when he rode to the wharf, when he entered the cabin
decked with flowers as if for a funeral, even when they steamed out
to sea, the bitter aftertaste of folly did not leave him. He was in
the mid-Atlantic before his self-communings began to be mitigated
by his sense of humor. Truly there had been no need to consider
quite so nicely his duties to Miss Thomas. He had thought himself
too far involved to retreat gracefully without a proposal. He had
felt compelled to precipitate matters. He had feared to wound her
deeply otherwise, though conscious, at the time, that his offer was
rather magnanimous than passionate. He had had a continual fear of
compromising her, too old-fashioned a reverence for woman, too European
a sense of honor. He had done her too much honor. Apparently she had
not considered him in so serious a light, this American.

That he had been a most unconscionable ass Vane knew very well. This
conviction, however, is a sentiment we can easily bear while it is
unshared by others, and, fortunately, none of Vane's friends were so
clearly convinced of it. None of his friends knew much about this
affair.

After all, he had almost given a sigh of relief when the welcome words
of freedom came to her lips. He was well out of it. It had been a very
sharp little skirmish, and he was not sorry that he had escaped in
good order, heart and honor whole. At this point Vane again appeared
to himself as an ass, but he only smiled at the apparition. Fortunate
affairs those, which vanish with a laugh! So he dismissed the matter
from his mind.

When Vane landed at Havre the whole thing seemed like a dream. There
was the familiar chalk cliff and the wide estuary, and the people
seated on little, iron, painted chairs, in the cafés, reading _Figaro_,
just as he had left them, with nothing changed but the date in the
newspaper. A certain flippancy lurks in the sky of France, or was the
flippancy _là-bas_ in America? Vane was not quite sure.

He had had no letter from the doctor since that first one received
in New York. Indeed there had been no way for one to have reached
him before his arrival in Havre, and he was not sure that the doctor
knew in which steamer he was crossing. But Vane was anxious to get to
Rennes. Instead of going up one side of the river and down the other
by rail, he decided to make a cut across the country, so he took the
ferry for Trouville. The place was full of people--people such as you
find anywhere, people such as you might see in Newport or New York--and
Vane hastened to leave it. He found a diligence driven by an old man
in a blue blouse, that took the country people and their eggs and
chickens to and from the market at Trouville, and retained a seat on
the outside. They left the watering-place at sunset, and, after driving
a few miles along the beach--the fashionable drive--by the painted
pavilions and villas, they struck inland through the grass uplands
still fragrant with the hay.

I do not want to make anything tragic of Vane's arrival at Rennes. It
was hardly that to him. He had taken the midnight mail from Caen after
a six hours' journey in the sweet July evening; and when he arrived in
Rennes in the morning his mother was dead and had been buried, and the
priests in the great cathedral, even then, were saying masses for her
soul. The old physician, like few physicians, but like all old Bretons,
was an ardent Catholic, and had sought to secure to his patient one
surreptitious chance of salvation before his heretic friend arrived.
"Yes, my son," said he, "at the last she died, _tout doucement_, it is
now three weeks. She never recovered herself, though I had the abbé
with her and the Presence by her side. She never knew you or me, thou
dost remember, and at the end she died silently, and spoke not at all.
Ah! mon pauvre ami, quelle sainte femme!" cried the doctor, forgetting
that he had never known Mrs. Vane in her right mind.

The masses, thought Vane, would do no harm, and he stayed two or three
weeks with Dr. Kérouec in his old house near Rennes.

The doctor, though growing old, was very busy. He had numberless
charitable meetings in the afternoons, and his practice took up the
mornings. His evenings were usually passed with Vane and the abbé over
tric-trac and boston. The doctor was the head of many benevolent clubs,
"Sociétés de Consommation," and such like. He knew to a unit how many
poor people had consumed the society's soup, for each of the past forty
years, in Rennes, and seemed to derive much satisfaction from these
figures and their annual increase. He never spoke again to Vane of the
young lady with the dot, and it turned out that she had married M. le
Vicomte's son.

Meantime Vane wandered through the rosy lanes, and the country came to
him with a sense of rest. Life's silent woods are so near its highways,
after all! And Vane had been a boy in this country, and it had a
glamour for him; and, truly, it is a sweet corner in the world. He had
gone out of it into all that was great and new, and now he came back to
it, like a foot-worn pilgrim, with nothing but his staff and scrip. And
as he thought this, he was passing a great army of the peasantry, not
all peasantry, for many a lady, too, was walking amid the wooden shoes.
Before the long procession, among the crucifixes, was carried the
ermine banner of Queen Anne. It was the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes.
He looked after them curiously, so earnestly they marched, chanting
their simple aves and their litanies to St. Anne of Auray. But they
did not walk to Gascony, but only to the railway, whence they went by
special train.

Vane did not feel deeply his mother's death. Indeed it hardly seemed
that she could have died so lately; it was rather as if she had
been dead many years. All the old seemed to have faded away out of
his life, and everything new was rather unreal. As for Baby Thomas,
she was either forgotten completely or dismissed with a slighting
half-memory. The older love was as much in his mind and its ghost
was as real a figure as this memory of yesterday. He walked over to
Monrepos one afternoon when the doctor had a meeting at his house.
The place was rented by an English family, and some stout girls were
playing lawn tennis, while a comely youth, lying lazily on the grass,
looked on critically over a short pipe. Vane sat on the walk and
began to poke pebbles with his stick again. He had succeeded; and the
result was emptiness. Why could not this poor sordid success have come
sooner,--and his father, and so his mother, might have been alive
to-day.




XVII.


WHEN he got home (Dr. Kérouec's house he called _home_) he found two
American letters. One was a business letter, but on the other he
recognized the familiar delicate angles of Miss Thomas's writing. He
was displeased at this. The note was like some petty daily duty busying
one in an hour of insight--like the call of the prompter in some stupid
play. It changed all, even to the language of his thought. What the
deuce can she have to say in a letter? he said to himself. He thought
he had done with her.

It was characteristic of the man that he opened the business letter
first. It was from his partner, who was growing old and more and more
reliant on Vane's judgment, and it contained an offer of a quarter of a
million from Welsh for their interest in the Bellefontaine and Pacific
Railway. Nearly every village in the Western States has a Pacific
railway, but comparatively few have reached the Pacific. Most of them
run vaguely in a westerly direction for a hundred miles or so, and are
managed by an agent of the bondholders. But the Bellefontaine P. R.
was parallel to another Pacific road, which had at last been put on a
successful basis by Welsh, the railroad king; and Welsh, who had sold
all his own stock in the successful road, of which he was president,
and who had further agreed to sell considerably more stock than he
owned, was now desirous of finishing the Bellefontaine and Pacific,
and running it in competition with his own road. Vane wrote a telegram
advising his partner to demand half a million for their interest in the
Bellefontaine Pacific; and then he opened Miss Thomas's letter. Cinerea
Lake, June 25, 187-, it was dated. Now, where and what, thought Vane,
is Cinerea?

   "My dear Mr. Vane," it ran on, "I think of you all the day, and often
   cannot sleep at night. What can you think of me? If I could only see
   you, and feel that you would understand me; how unhappy you have
   made me by what you told me the other evening! I wish now that I had
   not told you of my forgiveness, although I had fully forgiven you in
   my heart. I wish I had not spoken it, and then our friendship would
   not have been broken. I feel now that you cannot think of me as your
   friend; that you believe I have been intentionally cruel and unkind
   to you. Why _did_ you tell me?

   "I may be doing wrong, wrong again, in writing to you. I want so much
   to ask you to come to see me--you will come, won't you? when you come
   back?

                                       "W. T. Sunday night."

"Pish!" said Vane, and he crumpled up the letter in his pocket and went
to walk, in the late afternoon. Returning, the doctor passed him in a
carriage with footmen, and he met him on the threshold of his house
with an invitation to visit at Monrepos. The people who had taken the
place were friends of the Greshams, and had known Mrs. Vane. Of course,
Vane could not go; but the question gave the needed fillip to his
action. He must do something; he must go somewhere. It is the nature of
man to go somewhere.

So Vane went to many places that summer. It is customary in romances
for men thus wandering to be haunted by the thought of something. Vane
was haunted by the thought of nothing. He did not even think of Miss
Thomas, or, if he thought of her, it was to think that he thought
nothing of her; it is nearly the same thing. He began by going to
Biarritz and Lourdes, in the path of the pilgrims. At Lourdes there
is a modern, ugly church upon a hill, with modern, manufactured glass
within; the grotto is underneath, surrounded always by hundreds of
pilgrims--many bedridden, some dying. The figure of the Virgin is robed
in a white gown, with a blue silk wrapper and a golden crown. You
may buy small replicas of it in the shops. Vane was duly shocked, as
becomes a Protestant. But one thing he liked in Lourdes--an expression
he heard used by an old priest in defending the miracle. It was, he
said, an example of the divine foolishness of the ways of God--the
Virgin's appearance to a simple child. Vane fancied that there might be
follies that had something in them of divine and much good sense that
smacked only of the world and the flesh. One got plenty of good sense
in New York.

When he left Lourdes he went eastward, through Gascony and Languedoc.
The sweet contentment of the harvest was over the country, the healthy
happiness of nature's reproduction, of fruitage and of growing seed.
All earth and nature is happy where it is not conscious. There was a
mighty harvest that year, and all the people of the country were busied
with it, getting themselves their daily bread, delivered, for the time,
from evil.

In the south of France there are wide plains and cornfields, and in
them is more than one great dead city, sleeping like some old warrior
in the peaceful afternoon of his days. The huge armor of cyclopean
walls has served its time, but still stands out, frowning, from the
sea of yellow grain; the city inside has shrunk within the walls, and
no longer fills them. Such a place is Aigues Mortes or Carcassonne;
nestling in the arms of fortresses, quiet and still, as if protected
by them and lulled to sleep. Stern in semblance as these walls may be,
they are pasteboard, like Don Quixote's helmet; they date from less
noisy days than ours; the mortarless masonry would rattle to the ground
at the sound of cannon. However, they have been of use in older days,
and it is pleasant, even now, to wander in the summer by the shadow of
the walls and look out upon the farms and the green things growing.

When a New Yorker enters these places, though, their atmosphere
is something deathlike to him. This merely vegetable growth, this
life of the market-day and harvest, is deathly dull; and the place
itself, as the phrase is, dead and alive. Possibly, our fabulous New
Yorker visiting these places (if he visits them we must make him
fabulous)--possibly, he may find things to admire in them; and the
first day, he smokes his cigar on the battlements and gets along well
enough. But towards the afternoon of the second--when he has had his
morning drive, and his daughter has brought home her water-color--a
terrible pall of silence, a stealthy, dread ennui comes over him. Ten
to one but he flies by the night express to the nearest city with an
evening paper--Marseilles, let us say, or Nice. And there, the daughter
finds a band in the Promenade des Anglais, and her water-color remains
unfinished.

Vane was conscious of some of this; he had been long enough in New York
for that. There was little here to interest an American. But still, it
was pleasant; and life was made so simple an affair! and its outside
was so sweet. How much more life promised to one in America! He did not
distrust the promise; but a question is the first shade of doubt. And
it really seemed, sometimes, as if, in ceasing to oppress one another,
men had forgotten how to make each other happy.

There is much beauty to be found in the South of France; with a
something grander, more venerable, in these old moulds of life than one
can expect among discordant sects and syncretisms. Vane enjoyed his
summer to the full, and drank in the sunlight like a wine, forgetting
that he was alone. And the people seemed so full and sound; with
qualities of their own, and self-supporting lives; not characters that
they assumed, or tried to make other people give them; nor with natures
colorless, flavorless, save for some spirit of a poor ambition.

I do not know what Vane had in his mind when this last thought so
struggled for expression. He was not ill-natured, nor yet excessively
captious. I suppose he was a little disappointed with his own country.
At all events, he soon forgot America that summer. And, after all, he
had seen but one unit, and there are more than fifty millions of them.
Nor, perhaps, did he yet know Miss Thomas--the unit whom he had known
best.




XVIII.


IN his life, Henry Vane had hitherto been prospecting. He had sunk
several shafts deep into it, and had worked them honestly, but he
had not had very much success. He had struck gold; but he had not
struck much of anything else; and gold had now ceased to be of the
first importance. The prime solution of the difficulty had only been
postponed, in Brittany, that day five years before; it had not been
met. The demands of a human life had never been liquidated; they had
been funded, temporarily; and now the note was falling due. He, also,
had been getting his daily bread, and had been delivered from evil.

But now the old question kept recurring, and the sphinx would have an
answer. The premature harvest was over (he was in Spain), forced into
sooner ripeness by those passionate skies; all the country was burned,
the herbage gone, the hot earth cracked and ravined. Only the yellow
oranges were yet to come, that ripened for the winter; and the orange
groves still gave some verdure to the hills, contrasting with the sober
skies. Along the ridge by the Mediterranean was a file of graceful palm
trees, swinging their languid arms above the sea.

Vane had come along the coast as far as Tarragona; and he was lying
in the shadow of the lovely hill of Monserrat, thinking. He had been
reading his letters again; and was seeking to come to some resolve.
Nobody in the world had any claim upon his action now, save only the
old doctor at Rennes. Vane had promised him a visit every summer.

He had now no great duty in America; but still, he felt that he
must soon be going back. For good or evil, his path lay there. And
after all, this island in an eddy of the world, this shore of the
Mediterranean, facing backward to the East--it was idle staying here.
He smiled to himself as he thought of his own older thoughts, when he
had melodramatically planned for a war or some forlorn hope in African
discovery. There is something half shameful, half sad, in seeing one's
own older folly, one's boyish vanity and egotism. He had the necessary
money now, but there was no longer anything attractive to him in the
life of Paris; even dreams of adventure in the Soudan did not now fire
his imagination. Vane had learned that no American could do without
America, least of all an American with nothing but his country left.
What was he doing on this shelvage of a bounded sea? this stage setting
for past dramas, where the play was over and the lights turned out. And
Vane thought to himself of Bellefontaine, Ohio, and the great future
of the West, and eager Wall Street. The phrases rolled off glibly,
like a well-taught lesson. Still, their being trite did not prevent
their being true. Surely there was something real, something actual,
progressive in America, to make one's life worth living there. His own
country aroused his interest, was worth his study. As for the trivial
girl with whom he had flirted--by whom he had been corrupted--he had
wasted his time over her. When he went back he would go farther abroad.

And return he must. He was wanted in America. The--the affairs of his
bank required his presence. His old partner, by this time, was probably
wild with irritation and amazement at his prolonged absence; and there
would be heaps of letters awaiting him at Seville; a _crescendo_ of
increasing urgency, ending with daily telegrams. Then there was the
sale of the railway. If successful, it meant an assured fortune, to him
and his heirs, if he had any. And an assured fortune is like a license,
a ticket-of-leave to mould your future as you will. Vane spent much
time in endeavoring to make this motive sufficient unto himself.

He took steamer at Valencia and sailed out, westward, between the
Pillars of Hercules. After all, this was more than Ulysses had ever
dared do, and Ulysses was a hero of epic. Moreover, like any Irish
emigrant, Ulysses had believed in the blessed Western isles. But then
Ulysses had been in search of a home; he, Vane, was only in search of a
fortune.

The steamer touched at Cadiz for several days; and there Vane went
ashore and ran up to Seville, by rail, to get his letters. There was no
other letter from Miss Thomas. Then he went to Granada, and wandered
for an evening through the Alhambra.

He had got his New York papers at Seville, and he spent half an hour or
more looking over the stock quotations, on a hill near the Generalife.
Stocks seemed to be higher than ever; he had made still more money.
While he was doing this he heard the tinkling of a zither or guitar,
and, looking down, he saw that the sound proceeded from the courtyard
of what was, apparently, a little inn or venta.

The broad Vega lay smiling beneath him, stretching green and fertile
to the last low hill from which the banished Moor had looked back upon
Granada; while around him, in every street and alley, was the tinkle of
the waters, still rushing from their source in the snows through the
Moor's aqueducts, which kept his memory green with the verdure of the
one green spot in Spain. Far above, to the left of Vane as he sat, were
the pale snows of the Sierra Nevada, amber or ashen in the brown air of
evening. The short work of the Spanish day was over; the strumming of
guitars was multiplied in the stillness; and, looking down again, Vane
even saw a girl dancing in the little inn yard.

There was no other spectator but a swarthy man in black--her lover,
probably--with a gray hat, and a black scarf about his waist. He was
playing on the zither, and the girl began to sing some strange Spanish
air with long, chromatic cadences, and a wild, unusual rhythm.

They did not know that he was looking on; and the girl went on with her
dance, which no one else seemed to notice but the lover, who struck
his hands together, now and then, in applause or to mark the rhythm.
Vane watched with interest. It was curious to think that she was really
dancing, dancing and singing, and neither of them was paid for it.

Vane landed in New York about the first of September.




XIX.


HE went to the bank, and found that nothing more had been heard from
Welsh. There was nothing doing; even his partner was out of town. The
city was empty. Vane's first act was to send to Doctor Kérouec a sum
sufficient to endow liberally and for all time all the _sociétés de
consommation_ that there were in Rennes. It did not cost much; and the
money was thriftily invested by the doctor, with a most gratifying
increase in the annual statistics of soup. This he quarterly reported
to his young friend with as much satisfaction as if the statistics were
of souls saved for heaven; but there was a note of sadness now in the
old doctor's letters which had not been noticeable before.

The city was a mass of undistinguished humanity. Vane rather liked
this; and found much satisfaction in going to Coney Island and similar
places where the people asserted themselves with frankness and
sincerity. One's fellow-man is always interesting, when not factitious.

But after a very few weeks of New York, he wearied of it. He could not
bring himself to take so much interest in his business, now that it
was so very successful. The labor did not seem to him so healthy, so
satisfying as of old; it could hardly be termed his daily bread, even
by a stretch of metaphor. Moreover, one's daily bread is got for one
by wholesale in America; machine-raised, by the thousand bushels, in
Minnesota, and brought ready to hand for the million, like the other
raw materials of life.

Vane was tired of the raw material of life--he felt a want for
something that was not ground out by the wholesale. But the only
finished product he had yet seen was Miss Winifred Thomas. She was a
product of the city--perhaps he ought to go further afield. Wemyss had
once said that people only got the means of living in New York. They
went elsewhere to live.

And the young man was anxious, above all things, to live, to find in
life what was earnest and genuine: not the mere means, like money, nor
the makeshifts, like fashion. Vane wanted happiness, not pleasure; like
most young men, he felt injured if he did not get it.

It may have been this craving for humanity that made the city
unendurable to him, or it may have been the heat, which, late in
September, was most intense. Whatever it was, he felt restless and
uneasy in the city, and cast about him where he could best go for
seclusion and fresh air. Some acquaintance suggested Cinerea Lake.
It was at that time crowded with people, which would make seclusion
easy; and it was a "popular summer resort," which, he thought, would
be a novelty to him, coming from Carcassonne and the monasteries of
Monserrat. Moreover, Cinerea was one of the places in America which
people visited solely in search of happiness.

Cinerea Lake was formerly known as Butternut Pond; it belonged to a
Mr. Sabin; and the village was Sabin's simply. But the pond is really
a lake, and it lies near a spur of the Appalachian Mountains. The
place had originally been marked by a farmhouse only, to which some
popular preacher had betaken himself for the summer months. In an
evil moment he had come back, one autumn, and written a book about
the delights of the hills; the delights that he found in the hills.
In the next year seven-eighths of the ladies in his parish, and their
friends, had settled upon the country, in search, they too, of the
delights of the hills; they occupied the farmhouses within a radius of
several miles, and crocheted. The year after that had witnessed, at
only a few weeks' interval, the foundation and the completion of the
Butternut Grand Hotel. And now the place was beginning to be known to
that world which calls itself _society_, and which the rest of society
calls fashionable. Little of all this was known to Vane, however. He
understood that it was cool and crowded, and thither he accordingly
went.

Vane had his days of self-gratulation, like another; and it was in
one of them that he left town for his vacation. He felt that soon a
fortune, and a large one, would be assured him. He was an independent
and successful citizen of America, with all his country before him,
and the chances in his favor. He had lately seen something of a friend
or two also in town for the summer; and had had an occasional little
dinner with John or some other man, in the club, or by the sea; Vane
was sociable enough, though not gregarious, and he felt rich in
acquaintances with half a dozen or so. They were most of them still in
the city; and Vane felt a sense of freedom, of adventure, as he left
it, which became stronger every moment as the train flew northward. But
the journey was one of many hours, and it was late in the twilight of
the next afternoon before he alighted at Cinerea Lake--called Cinerea
by the ladies who had looked in the lexicon to christen it anew.




XX.


THE Butternut Grand Hotel was large and white; with a hundred windows,
all of the same size, equidistant, and in four parallel rows. Had any
one of them been unfinished, like the window in Aladdin's tower, it
need not have so remained; with a few hours' work any joiner could have
evened it up with the rest. A huge verandah surrounded the structure,
roofed above the second story; and up and down the painted floor of
this verandah a score of pairs of young ladies promenaded. Young ladies
they were called in the society columns of the summer Sunday papers;
speaking colloquially, one might have called them girls. Vane's black
suit was dusty, and in his travel-stained condition it was embarrassing
to be the object of young feminine eyes; but as most of them stopped
their walk to observe his entrance, there was nothing for it but to
cast his own eyes down, and walk modestly through the line. It was a
worse gantlet than the Calais pier. Vane went to the office to ask for
his room; but it was some minutes before the clerk, who was talking
with another gentleman, could give him his attention. When he did so he
scanned Vane rudely before replying, and at last, as he opened his lips
to answer, two of the young ladies from the piazza rushed in to ask
for their mail, and, pushing Vane slightly aside, engaged the clerk's
attention. "Now, Mr. Hitchcock, you don't mean to tell me you have no
letters for _me_?" said one. The other looked at Vane while she spoke,
as, indeed, did the speaker.

When the clerk began sorting the heap of letters which had just come in
the coach, Vane acquired the flattering conviction that the mail was
but a pretext, and himself the cause.

"There are none, indeed, Miss Morse," said the clerk; and the girls
fluttered gaily out. "I'll write you one myself, if you'll wait," added
the clerk jocosely. But the only reply to this was a Parthian glance
from Miss Morse, which embraced Vane in its orbit. The clerk looked
after them with a smile, and then, after meditating a moment, turned to
Vane.

"Now, what can I do for you, sir?"

"I believe I engaged a room."

"What name?"

"Vane."

"Three twelve," said the clerk, and turned back to his first
interlocutor, who had been standing silent in the meantime, chewing a
toothpick and regarding the opposite wall.

Vane's chamber was a long and narrow room shaped like a pigeon-hole in
a desk. A ventilating window was above the door, and a single window
opposite, uncurtained, looking out upon a long, monotonous slope of
mountain, which was clothed shabbily in a wood of short firs. The sides
and roof of the room were of coarse plaster; a red carpet was upon the
floor. Some delay was caused by Vane's ringing for a bath, and still
further delay by the waitress in obtaining the information that he
could not have one unless he gave notice the day before. While Vane
was waiting for all this he heard the door of the next room open, and
the distinctness of the feminine voices bore testimony to the thinness
of the walls. There were seemingly two young ladies there, but their
conversation was interrupted by a gong, which, as one of the voices
informed him, was the gong for supper. A consequent scuffle took place,
and this was only ended by the final bang of the door that announced
the departure of his neighbors.

Vane followed their example, and entered a long dining-hall in which
two rows of tables, eighteen in each row, were disposed transversely;
there were eighteen seats at every table, many of which were already
occupied. After waiting a minute at the door he was shown to a seat
next a Jewish family and several young men--evidently a sort of omnibus
table, to which the negro waiters, with a nice social discrimination,
ushered solitary males. Possibly for this reason, they were not well
served. The table was covered with little oval dishes of coarse
stoneware containing dip-toast, fried potatoes, and slices of cold
meat. Steaks and omelets were announced in a printed bill of fare, and
tea and coffee. Vane was unable to interest himself in his companions,
and watched the people coming in. Most of the elderly ladies and some
of the young girls wore large solitaire diamonds, and bore down, as if
under full sail, through the broad aisle, with elaborate assumption of
indifference and social dignity. It was evident that, to many of them,
the people who were seated at these tables represented the World. The
men looked more respectable, but even more out of place; and the girls,
of whom many were pretty, came tripping in by twos, with infinite
variety of gait and action. Vane noticed that Miss Morse and her friend
had changed their dresses. They did not look at him. Miss Morse's
friend had a novel in her hand which she read during the meal.

After supper Vane walked up and down the verandah. Most of the girls
did the same, still in couples. Despite the cool mountain air, many
of them wore low-throated muslin dresses. Vane's quasi-acquaintance,
Miss Morse, was not among them; but about nine in the evening a figure
came out of a side-door in front of him, in a sort of summer evening
ball dress, and stood a moment by the piazza railing, pensively looking
at the stars. As Vane passed by he saw that it was Miss Morse, and he
could not help wondering whether she expected him to speak to her. As
he passed the windows of the large dining-hall brilliantly lighted with
gas, he saw that they were dancing inside. A few instruments were in
one corner, and perhaps half a dozen couples waltzing on the floor.
Some young men were there in evening dress, but not enough to go round,
and many of the girls were dancing with each other. Vane had to admit
that most of them danced very gracefully and well. After a moment, Miss
Morse came in. She had apparently some pretensions, for she sank into
an arm-chair in one corner of the room, and refused to dance. There was
a sort of master of ceremonies in the person of a sallow and thin but
dapper young gentleman who had all the affable address of a popular
lady's salesman, and Vane saw him present several young men to Miss
Morse. All this became at last somewhat tiresome, and, feeling lonely,
Vane went to bed.

He had almost got to sleep when he was aroused by the voices of his
feminine neighbors. "Well, I think he's perfectly horrid," said one.
"No," said another, "he ain't much of an addition. I told father I must
have two new ball dresses, because I was coming here for the society. I
had to tease him for them for a month, and now, I declare, I might just
as well have stayed in the city all summer. Come and undo this, will
you, please?"

"Sh!" said the other voice, "how do you know there isn't some one next
door?" A silence followed, interrupted by bursts of stifled laughter.

"Well, I don't care," said the first voice. "There wasn't any one
there yesterday, anyhow. Did you see how he was dressed? Nothing but a
common, rough suit."

"Oh, don't you like that? Why, I call that real distinguished."

"Well, anyhow, I don't see why he couldn't get introduced. I call
it simply rude, Englishman or no Englishman." At this point the
unfortunate stranger seemed finally disposed of, and Vane went to sleep.




XXI.


THERE is one long road at Cinerea Lake, always dusty, with a sidewalk
of planks. The hotel, with the appendant cottages, is on the one
side, and a few old farmhouses, now boarding-houses, with a dozen
little wooden shops, are on the other. Most of the shops sell novels,
sweetmeats, embroidery work, and newspapers. There were not many men
at Cinerea. It is not customary in America for men to join their wives
and children on pleasure excursions. What few men there were seemed
oppressed by the novelty of the position, and sat in chairs upon the
piazza, with their feet upon the railing. They seldom ventured farther
during the day. There was a stock telegraph instrument in the hall of
the hotel, and an enterprising New York broker had an office in an
ante-room. Vane noticed that every one of these gentlemen left their
foot-rests on the verandah shortly after breakfast, and, following them
to the nearest store, he learned that this activity was caused by a
desire to purchase the evening papers of the day before, which arrived,
as a written placard informed him, at 9.45 A.M. Vane himself asked for
a paper, but got no answer from the young woman behind the counter,
while a friend who was sitting with her, working, and eating pieces
of chocolate from a paper bag upon her lap, stopped her embroidery a
moment to stare at him rudely. Suddenly it dawned upon Vane that he
had seen the faces of these two ladies at his hotel. They were sitting
on a little piazza in front of the shop, behind a small counter, but
the shop itself seemed to be a sort of club-room for the ladies of the
place, and these were evidently guests. Vane apologized for his error
with some inward amusement, but his speech was rewarded with a still
blanker stare from the young woman with the chocolate.

So far, this "popular summer resort" promised more errors than
entertainment. Vane had certainly never felt so lonely before as among
this gay company. Work gives its own companionship, but idleness is
gregarious. The place was full of girls of all styles of behavior and
prettiness. Some were playing tennis, others making up companies for
drives, others starting off for long walks. Vane had pictured the type
of American girlhood as something fragile and delicate, but these had
healthy faces and lithe young figures robed in flannel and untrammelled
by the dressmakers' art. They were bright, quick with their eyes, but
far from ethereal. Vane himself went to walk, and, after following the
road for a mile or so, entered a woody path, which, as a finger-post
assured him, led to Diana's baths.

He felt much in the mood for a meeting with a heathen goddess, and
entered the forest accordingly. But he found nothing nearer Diana than
Miss Morse and her friend, who were sitting reading with two young
men. The path seemed to vanish where they sat, and Vane made hold to
stop and ask one of the young men the way. They were slow of speech,
and Miss Morse herself replied. She assured him that he was at his
destination, and Vane found himself, in a moment, in conversation with
her.

Diana's Baths were formed by a small brook trickling over some mossy
rocks and making a few pools in which Diana might possibly have wet her
feet. Vane made this suggestion, which was received with much laughter,
at the end of which he found himself on such a footing of intimacy that
he was being introduced to Miss Morse's companions: "Miss Westerhouse,
may I introduce Mr.---- Mr.----" "Vane," suggested he. "Mr. Vane,
of New York, Miss Morse. Miss Westerhouse, Mr. Vane. Mr. Vane, Mr.
Thomson and Mr. Dibble." The young men nodded rather awkwardly. Miss
Westerhouse made a place on the rock beside her, and Vane sat down
wondering how the situation would be explained, and who had told her
that he came from New York.

"I met you yesterday on your arrival, did I not?" Miss Morse went on.

Vane admitted that she had, and remembered the scene with the hotel
clerk.

"Coming from New York, I fear you will find Cinerea Lake rather dull.
We are after the season, you know."

He hastened to assure her that he had found the place most attractive.

"It is getting to be rather too well known now, but it is pretty,
though not so nice as it was. You meet all sorts of people here
already."

Vane felt duly instructed as to the social position of his companions,
and assented, with much honesty, to her last statement.

"It is not very gay here, now. We have a hop twice a week."

"That will be delightful," said Vane with enthusiasm.

"Do you reside in New York?" Miss Westerhouse broke in.

"As much as I do anywhere," said Vane. "I have to travel a great deal."
Vane noticed a sudden lack of interest in him after this remark, and
fancied that they set him down for a commercial traveler. "I have only
lived in New York of late years, and then only when I am not----on the
road," he added, as the humorous view of the situation struck him. A
silence followed this remark, and a certain coldness; but Vane, who had
a particularly comfortable place, leaning back on a mossy rock, made no
motion to go. Finally Miss Westerhouse made an effort.

"Then you are not much acquainted in New York."

"I have a good many business acquaintances."

"Oh, I mean your lady friends."

"I have none," said Vane.

"Some very pleasant New Yorkers have been here," said Miss Morse, "but
they only stayed a few days. Mrs. Haviland and Miss Thomas----" Vane
could not repress a slight movement. "Do you know them?" said the young
lady with some interest.

"Miss Winifred Thomas?"

"This was Miss Baby----"

"It is the same person," said Vane, with decision.

"Is she not just too lovely?" broke in again Miss Westerhouse, with
enthusiasm. Vane could not but concur in this sentiment. Miss Morse's
interest in him seemed revived.

"I suppose we must go back to dinner now," said she. "By the way, we
are going to have a straw-ride this afternoon. Would you not like to
come, Mr. Vane? The gentlemen are getting it up. Mr. Dibble, here, is
chief manager----"

Vane said he should be delighted, and they rose to go. Picking up
two books and a bonbonnière which lay upon the grass, he followed
Miss Morse. He looked at the books as he went, and uttered a slight
ejaculation. One, to be sure, was _Lucile_, but the other was a volume
of Prosper Mérimée's _Lettres à une Inconnue_.

On the way back Vane was presented to several other young ladies, and
when he finally entered the hotel piazza, it was in company with a Miss
Parsons, of Brooklyn, who in turn presented him to a Miss Storrs, of
Cleveland, and left them, as she unnecessarily explained, to dress for
dinner.

Vane was rather ashamed to own to himself that he was displeased at
the acquaintance that seemed to have existed between Miss Thomas and
his late companions. Little as he cared for Miss Thomas, there was
certainly a world-wide difference between her and Miss Morse, Mr.
Thomson and Mr. Dibble; and yet he could not bring himself to admit
that he was snobbish or prejudiced. It was simply that the wealth
and education of these young ladies had outstripped their breeding,
while the young men were still seeking for the first. He pictured to
himself Miss Thomas sitting in flannels at Diana's Baths, and going on
straw-rides with Mr. Dibble, and the idea was distasteful to him.

It was surely an odd chance that he should travel upon her wake in this
way. Throughout the afternoon he occasionally caught himself wondering
how she would appear in these surroundings. This thing was a mixture of
Arcady and an American female college, with a touch of Vauxhall thrown
in. And it was only six weeks since he had wandered in the moonlight
of the Alhambra; and the harvest was hardly all gathered that had been
ripening about the walls of Carcassonne. Vane wished that he could meet
these people at home--that he could see their life really as it was.
Was this, then, all? It could not be. There must be something more real
behind it.

Vane could fancy, in the days when he had been in love, himself and
her living in that out-of-the-way corner in France, in that forgotten
nook sheltered on the backward shores of Spain, eddied in the flood
of modern life and civilization, where he had wandered in the pine
woods upon Monserrat. But this place, this painted wooden hotel, this
company, seemed more foreign to him than anything in the Old World.
What was it? What was it that gave the strange character to it all? Was
he, then, such a foreigner that he could not understand it? Was even
his love exotic, that it seemed impossible here?

The young man gave himself much mental trouble in getting at the
secret of this American life. And, in the last analysis, it seemed
unreal--unreal because it was temporary; because the old was going and
the new had not yet come; because it was like the wooden houses and the
temporary bridges, and the provisional social conventions, and the thin
fashionable veneer of neo-conservatism--it was suffered to remain until
the people found time and resolution to make a change.




XXII.


VANE, however, did not carry his analysis quite so far as this. He
found that it was unreal; there he stopped; the why was too heavy a
burden for him. He was ready and anxious enough to make it real; but
still, all through his life, the substance of life itself had kept
eluding him, and left the shadow in his hand.

Many of the girls (at Cinerea every woman under thirty is a girl)--many
of the girls were reading novels, American summer stories, written by
girls about other girls, and revelling in the summer life of girls.
Vane borrowed some of these and read them. They were so prettily
written, so charming, so awfully true, he was told; and he liked not
to confess that they gave him but a little passing amusement, which
was followed by much mental depression. It was all true and real,
then? Was Vane himself something of a prig? John Haviland did not
think so. But these stories seemed to him more immoral, or at all
events, more corrupting, than many a French romance ending in adultery.
There was in them an ignorance of all that is highest in life, a
calm, self-satisfied acceptance of a petty standard. The strength of
crime implies the strength of virtue, but the negation of both is
hopelessness. In defence of Vane, it might be said that he was really
not in the mood for pleasure at this time.

The straw-ride was unanimously declared to be a great success. Miss
Morse brought her volume of Mérimée along and read it to her young man
in the woods. Her young man for the afternoon, that is; she had no
special young man. The chaperone was the beautiful Mrs. Miles Breeze,
of Baltimore; she arrived suddenly, in the nick of time to go; and Vane
could see that Miss Morse was much elated at being under the wing of
so real a social personage. Ned Eddy was with her. When the company
paired off and scattered in the woods, Vane fell to the lot of a Miss
Gibbs, of Philadelphia, a still newer acquaintance to whom Miss Storrs
had introduced him. Miss Gibbs had a volume of Rossetti's poems with
her, and Vane read to her the "Last Confession" under the pine trees.
For many a foreigner, it would have been his first. But the hearts of
American young men are (very properly) bound in triple brass. Miss
Gibbs also knew Miss Thomas. She seemed relieved when she gathered from
Vane that Miss Storrs was an acquaintance of a few hours, and Misses
Morse and Westerhouse of the morning only. Evidently, thought Vane,
there were distinctions if not differences. Miss Gibbs combined much
good-breeding with her fascinations; and a dangerous _savoir faire_.

The next day he went to walk with a dark-haired girl in the morning,
and to drive with a yellow-haired widow in the afternoon. In the
evening he found himself drifting on the lake in a boat with Miss
Gibbs. Any one of these beauties would have been termed, by a
Frenchman, adorable; and probably he would have ventured to adore.
Other boats with similar couples were scattered over the lake, no
one too near another. As far as Vane could judge, it seemed to be
considered the proper thing for every young man to simulate the
deepest love for his companion of the hour. It was a sort of private
theatrical, with the out-door night for a stage; a midsummer night's
dream, of which the theme was _let's pretend we're lovers_. He was here
alone with Miss Gibbs under circumstances which in France would have
compelled him to marry her; and it was doubtful whether she would even
remember him as an acquaintance, in the city, a few weeks later.

He was glad to admit that there was something very creditable in the
fact that the thing was possible. Still this trifling, this mild but
continuous drugging of the affections, must have its demoralizing
effect. It was part result and part cause of that same unreality. The
only real thing about the hotel was the stock-ticker; and even there,
the stock that it registered was water. It was all very amusing. Yet
the fancy continually recurred of Miss Thomas, in this situation,
though he, of all men, would have had no right to be displeased; for
had she not definitely told him he had none? Still, it was hard to
divest himself of a certain sense of property in her; he had mentally
appropriated her for so long.

He was plashing carelessly with his oars, and watching the sheen of
moonlight on the outline of his companion's fair face, suffering
himself for a moment to wonder how the same light would have fallen in
Winifred's blue eyes, when Miss Gibbs again spoke of her.

"I had a letter from your friend Miss Thomas, to-day," said she. The
deuce she had! thought Vane; so she corresponds with Miss Gibbs, does
she? Vane was disgusted with himself for thinking so much about the
girl, and here he was caught thinking of her again.

He pulled a few nervous strokes. How could he see the letter without
exciting Miss Gibbs' curiosity? He managed it, finally, and read the
letter. He was secretly relieved to find that the note was quite formal
and was simply to tell Miss Gibbs that she need not forward a piece of
embroidery which had been left behind. More surprising was the news
that Miss Thomas was coming back. Vane made himself doubly attentive
to Miss Gibbs; and as each man walked back with his lady, and said to
her a long good night on the hotel piazza, implying all the sorrow of
a Romeo in parting from a Juliet, Vane was secretly wondering what the
deuce he was to do. "What the deuce!" was again the phrase he mentally
used. He did not wish to see the girl again--that was certain enough;
but it was decidedly undignified to run away. There was really a sort
of fatality in their meeting.

But the best way to treat a fatality is to make nothing of it. Thus
treated, it is seldom fatal. Then he was rather curious to see how Miss
Thomas would behave among these Dibbles and these Westerhouses. After
all, she too was an American; a little more sophisticated, a little
better endowed by nature; but she, too, made a toy of love, and actors
in private theatricals of her more "exciting" friends. "Exciting" was
a word that Vane had heard Miss Westerhouse apply to Mr. Dibble. Vane
had caught a little of the Parisian's contempt for flirting with young
girls. In a flirtation with married women, he thought, there were at
least possibilities; and the flirtations were not so utterly silly.
But marriage was far too serious an affair to be made fun of. At this
period Vane affected to himself an extreme cynicism. Intercourse with
Cinerea girls had corrupted him. They had given him their own levity.
At another time, he would have deplored the vulgarization of a lofty
sentiment; but since the past June he had been in a flippant mood
himself. The American cue was to make game of everything in fun, and
to make a hazard of life in earnest. He felt that he was becoming
Americanized.

Feminine companionship was certainly corrupting to earnestness, if
not to morals. By the end of this week he felt cloyed with too much
trifle. He sighed for a man and a cigar, for a seat in a club, for a
glass of brandy, for anything else masculine, for a little of man's
plain language and strong thinking. Yet these girls were no fools: they
read Prosper Mérimée's Letters, for example. They were emancipated
enough. But they also read Lucile. He understood why women were not
let into ancient religions, Freemasonry and the Egyptian mysteries.
They belittled the imagination. _Per contra_, they were essential to
the Eleusinian. Their only truly great rôle was the Mœnad. And yet, he
thought, these sentiments of his would have shocked these girls.

Vane's thoughts came and went nervously. He was driving in a buggy
alone, or, at least, only Miss Morse was with him. He was ashamed of
himself; he was ashamed of his thinking; he was ashamed, thinking as
he did, of his inconsistency in driving with Miss Morse in a buggy.
_Postiche, postiche_, it was all _postiche_, or was it frankness? Was
it the troubled dream, the low beginning of the new conditions? Was
his disapproval a bit of feudal prejudice? Vane was troubled, excited,
disgusted, confused. Miss Morse noticed all this, but thought he was in
love with her.

The only green spots in the man's memory were Rennes, and Monserrat,
and Carcassonne; yes, and the littered desk in the down-town office in
New York--the scene of his only labors and his one success. And that
success was no longer necessary; it no longer profited any one but
himself. Vane had never formulated his position with such precision
before. The last person of his own family was dead; he had claims upon
no one, no one had any claim upon him; he had no further ambitions upon
Mammon. Given this problem, what solution could the world offer--the
New York world, that is? Somebody says life is made up of labor,
art, love, and worship. New York had given him labor, which he had
performed. And of the others? Had it given him love, even? Was he a
barbarian, better fitted for a struggle with crude nature than New
York, not up to the refinements of modern civilization? Should he
leave these places? Now, that day Miss Thomas was to come, and he must
decide. He thirsted for happiness; how was he best to find it? These
thoughts, perhaps, seemed selfish, cold-blooded, practical, but there
was a sadness in them for Vane.

So thinking, as he drove his buggy along the road, they passed Miss
Thomas, walking gracefully, and the rich, slow color burned through
her face and fell away at her temples as she bowed. Vane drove on the
faster, flicking his horse with the whip, and considered what he would
do now that she had returned.

He would treat her like Miss Westerhouse and Miss Gibbs of
Philadelphia. He would not have his own movements disturbed by her
coming and going. He would stay his intended fortnight out and then go.




XXIII.


THERE was a mountain party that afternoon, organized by Mr. Dibble.
Vane supposed that Miss Thomas would be of the number, and himself
stayed away, not caring to meet her. But when he came back, after a
long walk, she was sitting on the piazza with Mrs. Haviland. Vane
passed by, raising his hat. She looked at him almost wistfully, not
blushing this time, but very pale. When he came down from his room,
before tea, he went up and spoke to her.

"You have not gone to the picnic, Miss Thomas!"

She looked up for a moment at him earnestly; then, dropping her eyes,
spoke gravely and rather coldly.

"I do not go on mountain parties, Mr. Vane."

"At Cinerea Lake?"

"At Cinerea Lake or elsewhere."

"Really, I had flattered myself that I had been enjoying your own
diversions."

Miss Thomas made no answer whatever to this. Then, after some
minutes--"Why did you not answer my letter?"

"I did not know it required an answer."

"I value your friendship very highly. It made me very unhappy."

"Apparently you were successful in concealing your unhappiness from
your friend Miss Gibbs. I did not know it was my friendship you cared
for."

"I am in the habit of concealing most things from Miss Gibbs. Have I
ever given you reason to suppose I cared for anything _else_ than your
friendship?"

"You have lost little of your old skill," said Vane, grimly. "I cannot
conceive, clever as you still are, that you should have been, for a
year, so slow of comprehension. You would rather I should think you a
flirt than maladroit."

"You think me so?" Miss Thomas spoke as if she were going to cry. Vane
looked at her.

"I beg your pardon," said he, simply, and walked away. Miss Thomas went
on with her sewing, bending her head over the work. Truly, thought
Vane, it was not a very manly thing in him taunting her that he had
failed to make her love him. But had he honestly tried? he questioned
himself, as he walked up and down the piazza that evening. Had he not
rather put the thing on a basis of flirtation from the beginning?

Bah! he was going back to his old innocence. He had definitely given
her to understand that he had loved her, and she had forced him to
the utmost boundary of the explicit, and in his foolish magnanimity
had made a fool of him. He had failed to make her love him; no one
could make her love until she chose, for worldly reasons of her own,
to try. He stopped his walk when next he passed by the place where she
was sitting. "You do not seem to have your old attention," he said,
brutally. He had a way of saying petty things when with her, and was
conscious of it.

"Why do you think I care for attention?" said she, simply.

"You cared for mine----"

"You admit it?"

----"Like that of any masculine unit."

"I used to respect you, Mr. Vane. Pray do not console me for the loss
of your friendship by showing me how worthless it is."

"You seem to have made that friendship of mine for you a matter of
common knowledge among the people in this place."

"I have never spoken of you to any one since you left, last June."

There was a ring of truth in her words, but Vane thought of Miss Gibbs
and her trivial talk. He sat down in the chair in front of her.

There was nothing said between them for a long time.

"You told me then that you had forgiven me. I thought it was so
noble in you! for I had acted very wrongly." Miss Thomas was
rocking nervously in her chair; she had a handkerchief in her hand;
occasionally in the dark, she touched it to her eyes. Vane took hold of
the end of the handkerchief, as it drooped from her hand. "I told you
then that I would forgive you--and it was true," he said.

"Then give me your friendship back. I am so lonely--without it," she
added in low tones. Vane still held the handkerchief, and moved it
slowly with the rocking, alternately drawing it forward and letting it
back; a subtle feminine influence seemed to be in the soft cambric, and
thrilled warm in his hand.

Vane felt very kindly toward her as he went to sleep that night. After
all, she was true, or meant to be, at least. It was not her fault, but
his, that she had not cared to be his wife. And it seemed to him that
he cared more for his opinion of her than for hers of him. He valued
his faith in her more than his hope of winning her.

Again, he doubted if he was in love with her; he doubted if he ever had
been; but he still felt for her a sort of tender pity. Poor, lonely,
little maiden; with all her beauty she was but a child as yet; and he
had expected from her the knowledge and discretion of a woman of the
world. Yes, surely, she was different from the other girls in this
place. He was glad that his momentary love had calmed and sweetened
into friendship.

Vane himself asked her to walk with him the next evening, and they went
at sunset through the grave mountain gorges. They were both very quiet;
the man had almost nothing to say. They knew one another too well for
ordinary conversation.

"Why are you so silent?" said she. "You never used to be so."

"Am I silent? I do not know why. I suppose I make up for having nothing
to say when I am with you by thinking of you so much when I am away.
There is so much to be thought, and so little to be said."

"I am glad that you still think of me."

Vane looked at her dense black hair, and the soft shine of moisture in
her upturned eyes. "The thoughts that I cannot say are so much stronger
than the things I can, that they overpower the others, and I can say
nothing," he said.

"Do you know, I often have imaginary conversations with you?"

"Tell me some of them."

"I cannot. I should say too much if I said anything."

"Remember our compact, to be only friends," said Vane, gravely. "Do not
speak as if you were more than a friend, or I shall think you less."

"I do remember our compact. That is why I do not say them."

The words sounded strangely, but Vane knew she was sincere when
she uttered them. When she pressed his hand that night at parting,
she still managed to let Vane know that he was to put no false
interpretation on her friendliness. She was a woman, and she did not
know herself, he thought; but she was not a girl, and she knew him.

A day or two after this they were drifting under the moonlight on the
lake. Her beauty had never seemed so marvellous to Vane as on that
evening; the soft darkness of her hair, and shadowed light of her blue
eyes, like the light of the night sky with the moon at the zenith.
Her head was drooping slightly, and one round white arm, bared to the
elbow, was trailing with a tender ripple in the water.

"Are you never going to marry, friend of mine?" said Vane, dropping his
oars to look at her.

"Yes," said she, "I shall marry when one man asks me."

"Who is he?"

"I have never met him," she muttered, dreamily. "I have never met but
one man like him."

Vane took his oar again. "She meant me to think she meant me," he
thought, and rowed vigorously. She seemed unconscious of the change
of motion, and her hand, still trailing in the water, wet her white
sleeve. Vane stopped rowing and seated himself beside her. "You are
wetting your arm," said he, lifting her hand from the water. She shall
love me, he thought to himself, as he looked at her. A moment later he
had taken her hand in his, and pushing the sleeve back from the arm
kissed it passionately. The woman made no sign for a moment or two;
then, as the man still held her hand, she came to herself with a little
shudder. "O don't, Mr. Vane, pray don't--oh, I ought not to have let
you do it--oh, pray go back----." Vane left her hand and looked at her
steadfastly. "Oh, I ought not to have spoken so," she went on, with a
little moan, "but I pitied you so----. O Mr. Vane, I was so sorry for
you, that I forgot; and you were looking at me, and you seemed to care
so much----"

"You told me of imaginary conversations you sometimes had with me,"
said Vane. "Cannot you tell me what they were?"

"Oh, I ought not to tell you," said she, breathlessly. "Can we not go
home? Will you not row me back?"

Vane slowly resumed his seat. "We each now owe the other forgiveness,"
said he. "If you would try to love me, I think I would wait." The
girl in front of him shuddered again, and bent her head away, till he
saw where her hair was pencilled into the ivory neck; then she spoke,
slowly and simply. "I have sometimes fancied that I could learn to care
for you, Mr. Vane--not now, not now--after a great many years, perhaps."

Vane was silent for some minutes. Then, as they neared the shore, he
spoke in a clear undertone. "Will you promise to tell me, if you ever
care for any one else--if I wait, Miss Thomas?"

She bowed her head still lower, and Vane took her hand again and held
it for a moment. He left in it the old lace handkerchief, still burned
at the edges. "When you send it back to me, I shall know what it
means," he said, and kissed it. "But while you still keep it, I shall
hope."

"Oh, I am wrong in saying this," she sighed. "I may never care for you.
And yet in certain ways I care for you so much. It seems sometimes to
me that I have no heart. I don't think I am worthy of you." She took
the handkerchief and put it in her pocket.




XXIV.


THEY walked back together. Vane felt a year removed from the happenings
of the last week, from Miss Morse, from all the others. It seemed as
if the painted hotel were to vanish, like a stage-setting, and he were
back in Carcassonne or Monserrat, back with her. All the genuine life
that he had missed so long was his: the earnestness, the simplicity of
olden times. Now no longer he asked himself what there was in America
for him to do.

In all this there was nothing sentimental; it was natural, real,
radical. That he ever could have doubted that he was in love!

What he felt for Winifred was passion, not sentiment, and he gloried
in it; it was because she was a woman, after all, and he a man, and he
knew now that he should win her.

There was a certain splendid excitement about Vane's life that autumn.
It was all so real to him now. The solution had come of itself. He
was not yet her lover, formally accepted, but he felt that he was her
lover in fact and truth. He was continually with her; following her
to Newport when she went there for a month, late in October. She not
only suffered him to be with her; she suffered him (as a woman may,
impalpably) to love her; even, now and then, to show his love for her,
as when he took her hand, or walked with her in autumn evenings by the
sea. Now and then she would repulse him, telling him that he must not
be confident of her; that it was only to be after many years; but her
repulses grew fainter and less frequent. It did not, even then, seem to
Vane as if he were teaching her to love; she was too sympathetic; she
felt too quickly and too closely every impulse of his own; his passion
was too readily reflected in the flush or paleness of her face. Rather
was she herself the mistress, Vane the scholar. Nothing he said or
sighed seemed to take her by surprise, to be unappreciated by her. He
augured well from this.

When a woman admits that she may come to like a man in time, she means
that she already loves him, but is not quite ready for marriage. It
was a more dangerous footing, their intimacy on these terms, than if
their troth had been fairly plighted. The man sought persistently to
win new concessions, to force further confessions; the woman, having
made the one admission, could but half resist. It brought about a new
declaration of his passion every day; pale, she listened to the torrent
of his words, now faintly chiding, now looking vacantly out to sea. The
worn voices of the ocean gave might and earnestness to his pleading,
and filled, with its own grave majesty, his broken pauses. Her hand
would grow cold as it lay between his own, and she sat silent; until,
with a start of self-reproach, she would regain her knowledge of the
present and make him lead her back among the streets and houses.

Vane went occasionally, for a few days, to the city, to look after
the affairs of his bank. The closing of his contract with Welsh, who
finally paid to the firm nearly a million, and the reinvestment of this
money, took much time. Vane had never been a better man of business
than when he decided on these matters, thinking, with a thrill in his
strong body, of the meeting, next day, and the long afternoon to be
passed on the shore with the woman that he loved. Some days Vane would
not go near her; he was still careful not to incur comment; he could
control himself. But hardly any one was left in Newport now, and their
walks far out upon the cliffs had generally escaped the notice of the
world.




XXV.


SHE came back to the city in November, but in the last of the month
again Vane persuaded her to go to Newport and spend a week when he
could be there all the time. She had an old aunt there at whose house
she visited; Vane had his permanent lodgings; and this was before the
time when many people stayed there through the winter. Vane had urged
her to let him meet her at the southern extremity of the island, where
the long ledges of rock run out to the reef; but sometimes she would
bid him walk thither with her, and would even seem to like to have
the notice of the town. They had given up their reading by this time,
and their small talk had long since ceased. Early in the autumn they
had begun with the Vita Nuova; but even Dante's words had seemed weak
to him, and after a few days the books had been thrown aside. She had
not urged him to go on with them. Every day, rain or storm, this late
week in autumn, they would skirt the cliffs, by the gardens with a few
geraniums or pansies still drooping in the trim parterres, and go far
out along the southern coves and beaches, where the full pulse of the
Atlantic rolled in from the Indies. Vane had tried every day to win
the final word; but all his passion had not done more than force her
to seek refuge in silence. This last day she had opened her lips once
or twice to speak, after a long pause, and then pressed them again
together. Vane always walked a yard or two from her side, and looked
at her fairly when he spoke. She would not sit down with him that day;
so they went on, mile after mile, along a still, gray sea. The sky was
cloudy, the waters had an oily look; and the waves were convex and
smooth until they broke, creaming about the sharp rocks. Vane made
another trial, just before they left the ocean to turn inland. She
seemed to feel that she ought to speak, then, but yet could only look
at him with her large blue eyes, the pupils slightly dilated. At last,
just as she was leaving him, "Come to see me, in a month, in New York,"
she said.

Vane went back that night and kept himself very busy. He heard little
from Miss Thomas during the time except that she had not returned from
Newport. She would never write to him since the June last past, though
he had often begged her to do so. On the afternoon before Christmas
Eve, at five o'clock, he called at her house. The room was just as
he remembered it the year before--if anything, a little more shabby.
She was standing alone as if she expected him. She was dressed in a
gown that he remembered, and looked younger and more like her old self
than she had seemed at Newport. She was smiling as he entered, but
though the smile did not enter her eyes, they were not deep. She held
something in her hand, which, as Vane approached, she extended to him.
"I want to give you back your handkerchief," she said. "I have felt
that I ought to for a long time. I wanted to do so at Newport, but I
could not bring myself to do it then."

Vane stopped in his walk to look at her. "You mean that you love some
one else?"

Miss Thomas bent her head a hair's breadth.

"Yes," said she, simply.

"Who is it?"

"Mr. Ten Eyck."

"Are you engaged to him?"

"No."

"Have you told him?"

"No."

"When are you going to tell him?"

"In a day or two."

Vane gave a heavy sigh. Miss Thomas sank in a chair, looking at the
fire, the handkerchief still in her hand.

"I thank you for telling me first," said Vane. He turned to go.

"You have forgotten your handkerchief," said she. Vane went back to get
it, avoiding the touch of her hand. Then he turned again, and the outer
door closed behind him, Miss Thomas still looking at the fire. It was a
rainy night and there had been snow previously. As Vane crossed Fifth
Avenue he threw the handkerchief into a pool of mire.

He went to his lodgings to shave and dress for dinner. His hand
trembled, and it seemed to him that he was very angry. He took dinner
at his club, and smoked a cigar afterward with a friend, and drank a
bottle of Burgundy.

"What has become of Ten Eyck this last month?" asked Vane, carelessly,
in the course of the evening.

"He's been at Newport lately," said the other. "He's just got back."

Vane went to bed rather early and slept heavily. It was unusual for
him to take so much wine. But he did not dream of Miss Thomas. In the
morning he felt that he had got over it, and he walked down-town to
his office. It was a clear winter's day, sharp and bright. They were
closing up the banking accounts for the year, and he worked hard all
the morning. He might now call himself very rich. He was an infinitely
better match than Ten Eyck. She must have loved him all along--from
the very beginning, thought he. He was very indignant with her. But
in the afternoon, even this feeling seemed to grow less strong. She
was a woman, after all. He could not blame her. He had been angry last
night, but now he felt that he could understand her. He almost liked
her the better for it. She had been true to herself and her first
love. He might have wished the same thing himself. Vane almost felt a
pride in his discovery of her nature. He had called her a woman from
the beginning. It was the fashion to decry American girls. She was
different from a girl. She was a true woman--a woman like Cleopatra or
like Helen. Had he first won her, she would have been true to him. He
argued savagely with himself, defending her.

He worked rapidly, and by noon the accounts were done. It was Christmas
Eve. Toward evening the sky became gray, with flakes of snow in the
air. Vane walked up to Central Park, and returned to dress for dinner.
Where was he to dine? The club was the best place to meet people. His
lodgings were dark, and he had some difficulty in finding a match; then
he dropped one of his shirt studs on the floor and had to grope for it.
Another one broke, and he threw open the drawer of his shaving-stand,
impatiently, to find one to replace it. Lying in the drawer was an old
revolver he had brought back from Minnesota two years before. He took
it out, placed the muzzle at his chest, and drew the trigger. As he
fell on the floor, he turned once over upon his side, holding up his
hands before his eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

So John ended his story. Of course he told it much less elaborately,
that evening in the club, than I have written it here. I suppose I
have told it more as if I were a novelist, trying to write a story.
John gave the facts briefly; but he described Vane's character pretty
carefully, even to his thoughts, as he had known the man so intimately.
Most of these descriptions I have tried to reproduce. And he ended
the story as I have ended it, even to the very words. It was a story
six years old when he told it to us; the man was forgotten, and the
girl was married. His suicide was at first ascribed to financial
difficulties, and the excitement soon subsided when his banking
accounts were shown to be correct.

I do not remember that there was very much said when John got through.
It was very late at night; most of the men were sleepy and we all had
to be down-town early in the morning. There was, indeed, a silence for
some time.

Finally the Major drew a long breath. "Well," said he, "my opinion
remains the same."

"And mine." "And mine," chimed in voices.

"The man was a fool," said Schuyler, simply.

"It was cowardly to shoot himself," said Daisy Blake.

"And to shoot himself for a girl!" cried Schuyler. "Just think what a
fellow may do with fifty thousand a year!"

"She was a woman," said John.

"Was she a woman? that is just the question," said the Major.

"The question," said another man, who had not yet spoken, "is whether
he really loved Baby Thomas--or the English girl, after all." This was
a new view of the case; and a moment's silence followed.

"No man, to see Mrs. Malgam now, would think a fellow had shot himself
for her," said another.

"How does she come to be Mrs. Malgam?"

"Oh, Malgam is her second husband," said Blake. "She has grown
tremendously fat."

"Well, good-night," said the Major, rising.

"Speaking of fifty thousand a year, how much did Vane really leave?"
said Schuyler to John.

"A million and a half, I believe."

"Whew!" said Schuyler; "I had no idea of that."

"The granger roads dropped half a point, when his death was known,"
said the Major, putting on his coat.

                               THE END.




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