Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, November, 1878», sayfa 9

"Would you have accepted such freedom?" I demanded, impatient that she did not respond.

"I would have died for him!" she exclaimed abruptly, but she said no more about Georgy or her lovers.

The sun had set, and the glory of the clouds was all reflected in the sea. The air grew chilly, and we went in and watched at the front door for Mr. Floyd and my mother to return from their drive. It seemed curiously like the old times, and once or twice I started at some sound, expecting to hear a querulous voice and see old Mr. Raymond with his fur wrappings crossing the hall leaning on Frederick, who carried his tiger-skin. Helen was too quick and sympathetic not to understand my startled look.

"He will never come any more," said she sadly. "He is sleeping up on the hill beside his wife and all his children. Had it not been for papa I should have felt that I must go there too, it seemed so strange and lonely for him."

Presently through the pale gloaming came my mother from her drive, and when I lifted her from the carriage and almost bore her up the steps in my arms, I felt a happiness and peace which seemed but the beginning of a blessed time. My mother had grown perhaps a little older in the last two years, but surely she had grown more beautiful. It was enough at first merely to look into her face: then when I followed her up to her room we told each other many, many things, but I invite none to follow me over that threshold.

"I took good care of your boy, Mary," said Mr. Floyd, coming up to us when we descended; and when I met my mother's look I felt again all the proud humility that a son can feel, beloved as I was beloved.

"He was not such a bad boy," pursued Mr. Floyd, ringing the bell and ordering tea, "and his faults, such as they were, belonged to his age.—Don't open your eyes, Helen, as if you expected to hear just what he did. I shall not betray him. All the world knows that when one is abroad one may commit enormities which there may be put inside your sleeve, while here they are as big as a meeting-house."

"I don't believe Floyd did anything wicked," remarked Helen with some spirit.

"We are at home now, Floyd," pursued he with an air of resignation, "and our little diversions are over. The eyes of two women are upon us. No more cakes and ale—nothing but rectitude, cold water, naps in the evening. I forgot, though, about our charming guest. While Miss Lenox is here ginger will be hot i' the mouth, and life will have a slight flavor of wickedness still."

"But where is Miss Lenox?" I asked.

"Miss Lenox is far too brilliant a young lady to stay constantly in a dull country-house," said Mr. Floyd. "The cottage people over at the Point raffolent, as our friends abroad say, upon the charming Miss Georgina. We have, after all, very little of her society. She goes on yachting-parties, to dinners, luncheons, picnics—everywhere, in fact, where the delicate lavender ribbons of slight mourning may be allowed. She has attended a déjeuner to-day, and we are every moment expecting that our gates of pearl will unclose and admit a celestial visitant."

"Now, papa," said Helen, "you shall not make fun of Georgy. Nobody does her justice."

"Don't they?" returned Mr. Floyd dryly. "Fiat justitia, then! Ruat cælum! One would follow the other in this case, I fear.—She generally, Floyd, brings home one or two in her train. You remember Antonio Thorpe? That young man is so often here that I am beginning to regard him as one of the regular drawbacks to existence, like draughts, indigestion, bills and other annoyances outrageously opposed to all our ideas of comfort, yet inevitable and to be borne with as good grace as may be."

"What on earth is Tony doing at the Point?"

"He dresses well," returned Mr. Floyd reflectively: "his hands are soft, his nails clean. I don't think he follows any occupation which demands manual labor. I can generally tell a man's business by his hands or his coat; but on Tony's irreproachable broadcloth not one shiny seam discloses what particular grist-mill he turns."

"Of course he has no grist-mill," said Helen. "I thought he was a man of fortune."

"I was the guardian of his youth," observed Mr. Floyd, "and when he was twenty-one I paid over to him intact the sum of money left to him by his father. It had originally been less than fifteen hundred dollars, but by lying untouched for nine years at compound interest it had nearly doubled. That was several years ago, and with the utmost frugality on his part I can't see how he could have worn such decent coats on the interest of that money all this time."

"But you put him into business half a dozen times," interposed my mother: "I suppose he made money."

"No, he never made any money. The only way Tony will make money honestly is by marrying a rich girl. Not that I assume him to be dishonest or a sharper, for I do think him a gentleman, after the fashion of Sir Fopling. He probably is considerably in debt, but floats himself from all danger of sinking by speculation or the like. Five times I set him at work to make his living: five times he was returned on my hands. His character possesses all the drawbacks of great genius, without any of its resources: he is proud, discontented, misunderstood, with a talent for failure."

"Is he a suitor of Miss Lenox's?" I asked. "He was never in the habit of admiring her."

"You can make up your mind," said Mr. Floyd with a shrug, thus dismissing the subject.—"Helen, my child, looking at this young man impartially and judicially, what do you think of him?" and he put his hand on my shoulder.

We were at tea, which was always an informal meal at The Headlands. Helen sat among the tea-cups, my mother had a little table by her sofa, and Mr. Floyd and I walked about carrying cream and sugar and cakes. I was on my way for a fresh cup when this question was put, and I went up to Helen and sat down beside her.

"Impartially and judicially," said I, "what do you think of me?"

Mr. Floyd took his seat on the other side of her, put his face close to hers and began to whisper all sorts of nonsense in her ear about me. "Tell him," said he, "to begin with, that he is a prig."

"But I don't know what a prig is."

"A prig is a handsome fellow born to create disturbance among the ladies."

She looked around at me and laughed. "Isn't he a goose?" she asked in a pretended whisper. "Where was it in Europe that he lost his brains? He has brought none of them home."

"It may have been at Damascus," said Mr. Floyd. "Did I tell you that after I fell through the trapdoor in Damascus and broke my ribs, they put a railing about the place and asked a piastre for a look at the spot where the American gentleman almost came to an untimely end?"

But Helen did not laugh: she put her arm about his neck and brought his cheek to her lip, and kept it there, giving it mute caresses now and then, while she smoothed his hair about his temples with her little hand.

"I'll take some more tea, if you please," remarked Mr. Floyd after a while in a meek voice.—"I'm obliged to endure a good deal of this sort of thing, my boy: it's not so unpleasant as it may look, but nevertheless it requires some stimulant to keep up an emotion of agreeable surprise. By the bye, what do you think of my little girl, now that she is quite grown up?"

"Don't dare to tell," said Helen. "I'm dreadfully vain all at once, for papa flatters me so that the rugged courtesy of the outside world would seem hard to me. Still, papa's compliments count for very little. When Georgy comes in presently just listen to what he says to her."

And precisely at this juncture there was a little commotion in the hall, and Miss Lenox did come in with Tony Thorpe. She had spoken to my mother, kissed Helen and answered Mr. Floyd's badinage before she saw me, yet when her eyes did turn toward me she showed no surprise.

"Have you come at last?" she inquired coolly, holding out her hand. "I am glad to see you again, Mr. Randolph."

I greeted her as calmly, and said, "How are you, Thorpe?" to her companion, with another shake of the hand. And then everybody sat down, and there was fresh tea brought. I noticed that Thorpe was quite assiduous in his attentions to Helen over the cups and saucers, and seemed as much at home in the house as a tame spaniel. Meanwhile, Miss Lenox had sat down by my mother and begun telling her the events of the day. The déjeuner had been given on a yacht in the bay, and had begun in mistake and ended in disaster: the wrong people had come, while the right ones had been kept away, like the invited guests in the Gospel. The sun had been too warm, the breeze too cool, the men who talked to her garrulous and stupid, and the women abominably over-dressed.

"Dear Helen," cried Georgy with effusion, "I have wished myself at home with you all day.—Dear Mrs. Randolph, tell me what you have been doing with yourselves;" and she wasted a slight caress on my mother.

"Our doings were nothing remarkable in themselves," said my mother gently, with a little smile—one of those smiles which women keep for use among themselves, and rarely give to men.

"Papa and Mrs. Randolph and I sat under a tree until dinner-time," said Helen. "We have been very idle, but had a delightful time nevertheless."

"Praying all the time that Miss Lenox was enjoying herself at the déjeuner," drawled Mr. Floyd.

Georgy had risen and was crossing the room, and now, passing Mr. Floyd, paused and looked down into his face as he surveyed her with a slightly satirical air.

"I am glad of anybody's prayers," she returned, quite unruffled, "but I am afraid, Mr. Floyd, yours are merely a pretty figure of speech."

Mr. Floyd suddenly sprang to his feet and walked up and down the room with a restless way he had. "I have it! I have it!" he exclaimed with a triumphant air. "It is a picture of a Wili of whom you remind me, Miss Lenox. I saw it in R–'s studio at Rome.—Don't you remember it, Floyd?"

I knew it very well, and was aware, besides, that R– had got the face from Dart's sketch-book.

"What is a Wili?" inquired Georgy, looking at me. "You know I used to go to you for all my bits of knowledge when I was a little girl, Mr. Randolph."

I rose and crossed the room to her side. "A Wili," said I, "is a betrothed maiden who dies before her wedding-day. Your knowledge of your sex may tell you why it is that she is never at peace in her grave, but is impelled by some unconquerable love of life to rise every night and dance till morning."

"With whom does she dance? Her unfortunate lover?"

"Oh, where Wilis live you see them dancing together in the woods and fields by moonlight and starlight, their white arms wreathed about each other and their long hair floating. When a Wili meets a youth abroad in the night-time she beseeches him to dance with her; and the voice of the Wili is so sweet, her eyes so terribly beautiful, her clasp so horribly close, that whether he will or not he must join the fatal dance and keep pace with her eager, frenzied movements. When morning comes the Wili has gone back to her grave."

"And where is the young man?" asked Georgy.

"They find him dead on the grass," put in Thorpe, who was standing behind Helen's chair. "It is death to dance with a Wili."

"Both of you seem very experienced young men," remarked Miss Lenox calmly. "Did either of you ever meet with a Wili?"

"I have frequently met them on flowering meads," I returned, laughing, "but when they invite me to dance I tell them I am unable to dance with even the prettiest of live women, I am such a miserable cripple."

"It's rather a pretty story," mused Georgy, "but I don't quite see what it means.—Do you, Helen?"

"It seems to be a sort of warning to young men to keep in o' nights," returned Helen with a droll little air.

"Dead women never trouble me," said Thorpe, "but I have had no end of charming dances with live ones.—Do you waltz, Miss Floyd?"

"Oh yes. Miss Lenox and I waltz together whenever we can get any one to play for us."

"That must be a tame amusement," rejoined Thorpe with an ineffable air of conceit.

"Thanks for the neat compliment," said Georgy, "but neither Miss Floyd nor myself suffer from the tameness."

"Oh, allow me to explain—"

"We are not so dull but that we can understand even the most stupid bungle at a compliment of any awkward man," yawned Georgy. "Some time, by and by, when I am very rich, and so old that I don't care what happens nor how I offend my admirers, I intend to give to the world a woman's opinion upon the fascinations of men."

"Bravo! I hope I may live a hundred or so years in order to hear it," said Mr. Floyd. "However, Miss Georgy, it would be safe enough for you to tell us now that you hold men contemptible, only practising your coquetries upon them for your own amusement, quite indifferent whether your shafts hit or go astray. We could bear the ordeal, for we should know very well that circumstances must vindicate us. We are, after all, superior to even the highest simian types, and our poor fascinations shine by comparison with those of even the most intelligent baboon; so we should be certain that, in spite of your opinion of us, you would go on making yourself beautiful for our approbation to the end of your life, because you have, in fact, no other object worth spending your energies upon."

"I confess," said Georgy, with a peculiar glance at Mr. Floyd, "some men are worth any effort."

Thorpe, after many vain attempts to engage Helen in conversation, took his leave, and when I went to the door with him he begged me to stroll down the grounds to the gate. He had a three-mile walk before him for his pains in coming home in the carriage with Miss Lenox, but he vowed that the pleasure he always found at The Headlands recompensed him for any labor. He burst into enthusiastic talk about the old times at Belfield: he remembered the charm of my mother's house, he said, and the good times we boys had enjoyed together. How was Holt now-a-days? and where was Dart? Was it true that Jack himself had thrown Miss Lenox over, or was the fault on her side? "She is much admired," he went on. "How do you think her looking? She has many lovers and two or three suitors. There is Judge Talbot, with his mind set on winning her."

"What category of her admirers do you come in?"

"I am neither lover nor suitor," he rejoined lightly. "Miss Lenox and I are on excellent terms of camaraderie—no more. Were I to admire any woman from my heart, it would be the one I have just left. Is she not the rarest, sweetest, dearest Lady Disdain in the world?"

"I cannot guess to whom you refer," said I, "for I am at a loss how to excuse the familiarity of your speech in reference to any lady in the house except Miss Lenox."

"Now, Randolph," exclaimed Thorpe, putting his hand on my shoulder, "you shall not bluff me off so. I would cut my tongue out before I used it too freely in praising a young lady like Miss Floyd. I knew her as a child: her father is my best friend, my benefactor. Remember, if I spoke too freely, that my Southern blood gives me more trouble than the chilly currents in your Northern veins."

He spoke so eagerly, and with such perfect temper, that I was ashamed of my momentary outburst. I shook hands with him cordially at the gate, and walked back slowly, looking at the heavy bank of fog lying in the east over which the moon was peering, and thinking of my mother, of Helen, perhaps a little of Georgy, although my heart was swelling with anger toward her still: so I told myself again and again. Yet how beautiful she was, with a new and bewildering tenderness in her manner! What had softened her? Was it suffering?

When I returned to the parlor she had gone up stairs, tired with her excursion, I heard, and longing for a night's rest. I sat down by my mother, and we talked until midnight, while Helen sang ballads to her father in the next room in a rare contralto voice which had gained strength and richness since I heard it last.

When, finally, Mr. Floyd—who always put off going to bed as a final necessity—allowed me to go up stairs, I found inside my dressing-case a folded paper on which these lines were written: "The prettiest hour of the day at The Headlands is at seven o'clock in the morning, down among the rocks."

I should have felt no doubt whose hand had put the notelet there even if it had failed to breathe the perfume of violets, which no one who knew Georgy Lenox could hesitate to recognize.

CHAPTER XVI

It was full two o'clock before I began to think of sleeping, but nevertheless I was on the rocks next morning at seven; and my punctuality was rewarded by the sight of Miss Lenox walking on the shore in a white dress. I clambered down and joined her before she seemed aware of my presence: then she turned and laughed softly in my face. "What an early riser you are!" she exclaimed. "You have brought excellent habits home from the lazy Old World."

"But it would be such a pity to miss 'the prettiest hour of the day'!" I retorted quickly.

"Were you surprised to meet me last night?" she asked.

"Perhaps so. I had at least not expected it. I was in Belfield on Wednesday, and supposed that you were there."

"You could easily have found out my whereabouts if you had called upon mamma. I should not have expected you to be in Belfield without going near our house."

"Mrs. Lenox has too often snubbed me in my boyhood for me to count upon her grace now," I returned. "But I hope your mother is very well."

But it was very droll to me that I had embarked upon something like an adventure for the sake of talking about old Mrs. Lenox. Still, Miss Georgy was well worth coming out to see with the flush of healthy sleep still upon cheek and lip and the morning light in her eyes.

"Mamma is well," said she soberly. "Poor papa too: though he is worked to death, he is still quite well."

"What does he do, then?" I asked. I knew that he was one of the book-keepers at the factories, but I wanted her to be the first to speak Jack's name.

"As soon as Mr. John Holt went into the business," she returned, very coolly, "he gave my father a position. He had promised to do it years before, and you know how well Jack keeps all his promises."

"Jack is faithful and true," I said, looking at her keenly. "No one will ever be able to say of him, 'That man has wronged me.'"

"What did he say about me?" she demanded suddenly, stopping short in her walk and facing me. "I shall have no disguises with you, Floyd: you know me too well. I never really loved Jack, good, kind and noble although I recognize him to be. When he offered me my freedom I took it. How could I have endured to wait for him, ruined, disgraced as he was, through the uncertainty and pain of years? It is impossible that he should be in a position to marry until my youth is passed."

Her voice was so tremulous and pleading, her eyes and lips so eloquent, that she needed no vindication. I pitied Jack more than ever, but still I no longer blamed her.

"You men have a hundred chances," she went on. "If the first fails you, you have no reason for despondency, for a better one is sure to come. We poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an encumbrance, upon him: he is better off without me."

"Nothing but devoted love could have held you to him in his trouble," said I. "If you did not feel that, your bondage through a hopeless engagement would have been a terrible burden."

"Tell me what he said," she murmured coaxingly. "Is he angry with me? does he complain of me?"

"No: no man could have spoken of you more kindly."

"Is he forgetting me?"

I met her look and smile with a curious thrill that I thought I had lived down years ago.

"I am afraid, Georgy," said I, "that you are not one of those women whom men forget."

"Jack will forget me. He is wedded to his business: he is angry with the world, maddened, desperate. I have walked out behind him at church in Belfield, and he has not seen me: I have met him driving in the streets, and he has not turned his head. The men who once trusted and believed in his father treated him shamefully after his misfortunes came, and Jack resented it: he goes about the place seeing nobody, holding his head high, and showing the men he meets that he asks no favor of any one of them. All the softness has gone out of him."

I told her how wrong her idea of him was, and presently found myself repeating many things that he had said. Before I ended I had even let her hear of our midnight stroll about the place and our look at the gabled room where we believed her to be sleeping. This pleased her.

"That is not unlike you," she remarked with charming complacency, "but I never before heard of Jack's doing anything so poetic."

"Jack is not a man to write poems," said I, "but he is one of the men poets write about. After you had gone up stairs last night Helen sang to her father, and the words of one of her songs were Heine's: it reminded me of Holt beneath your window."

"One of those German songs? I understand nothing but English."

"They have translated it, and it runs like this:

 
Silent the streets by night overtaken:
This house my darling's presence did grace;
But she the town has long forsaken,
Yet there stands the house in the selfsame place;
And there stands a man who upward is staring,
His hands hard wringing in outbursts of woe!"
 

I paused and looked into her face.

"That is not all of it?"

"No: I will tell you the rest some day."

"Did Jack 'wring his hands in outbursts of woe'?"

"Good Heavens, no! I presume we both stood with our hands in our pockets: I was smoking a cigar myself. It is only in poetry that one may be picturesque in one's grief now-a-days."

"Did you think of me when you stood there, Floyd?"

Her little fingers closed on the edge of my coat and she looked up in my eyes. I smiled demurely. I was determined to be quite the master of myself with Georgina. I had suffered too much from her in the past not to be on my guard. Still, it was hard to resist the upturned face—the face with which was associated all the passionate inspiration of my early life—the face I had carried in my mind and heart through all my wanderings, finding none to compare with it—the face which always came with flash and quickness when I felt the warm desire and longing to love somebody which youth must always know.

I kissed her.

She looked at me startled, and ran ten paces away and sat down upon a rock.

"Upon my word!" she exclaimed, bursting into light laughter, "you have learned pretty manners abroad!"

"I am so glad you like them," said I, going up to her.

"But I don't like them at all," she retorted, shaking her head. "You remind me of a toy I used to play with years ago—a very pretty, harmless, inoffensive-looking toy, but which when touched unguardedly changed all of a sudden into a dreadful little fiend that flew right up into your face. Such a surprise is enough to make one's hair turn gray."

"At any rate, I have vindicated myself from the charge of being, 'pretty, harmless and inoffensive,' have I not? As for the gray hairs, I don't see one."

"I quite admired you last night," sighed Georgy, "you looked so interesting and innocent. Now—"

"Have I then suffered in your estimation?"

"I shall remember hereafter," she said with a delightful little laugh, "to whom I am talking. Now let us forget all about it. There are other things I want to talk about. I want to ask you how you like Helen."

"How I like Helen?" I did not fancy her question: I had never approved her tone regarding her cousin. "I think Miss Floyd very beautiful, and a very elegant girl besides."

"Do you like her proud cold manner?"

"Is she proud and cold? Perhaps so to Thorpe: certainly, she is the most unaffected child where the rest of us are concerned."

"She never forgets her wealth and position. I do not blame her: in her place I should be quite spoiled. Think of it!" she went on, with such eagerness that tears stood in her eyes: "Mr. Raymond left her everything—everything except a hundred thousand dollars which he gave to a college. She is so rich that she can lose a hundred thousand dollars and never feel it. It did not belong to the property, but came from a deposit which had accumulated ever since she was a baby. She begged her grandfather to do some good with it: she did not want to have everything herself. Might he not have given it to me?—Helen would have liked that—but no: he hated me too well for that. It has all gone for a dreary old professorship in the college where he graduated sixty years ago. And I am as poor as ever!"

"But Helen is generous with her wealth, I am sure: she will do a great deal for you."

"She gave me the money to buy the dress I am wearing, the very shoes on my feet;" and she granted me a delicious glimpse of French slippers. "But do you suppose I like alms? If I am a beggar, Floyd, it is from necessity, not because I have not plenty of pride. The child means to be good to me, I suppose, but it makes me bitterly angry with her at times that she has the right to be gracious and condescending. I am such an unlucky girl!"

But she laughed while she complained, and I echoed her laugh when she said she was unlucky.

"You unlucky!" I exclaimed. "You are one of those women who have it in their power to have every wish in life granted."

"I am not so sure of that. Besides, it is hard for me to know what I want now-a-days. I used to think if a fairy came offering me the fulfilment of my dearest longing, it would be easy enough to secure lifelong happiness at once: I should have asked for wealth. But now they are comfortable at home: they would not know how to spend more money than papa earns at the factory. And I am comparatively rich: I have almost five hundred dollars in my purse, part of the thousand which Helen gave me a month ago. I cried myself to sleep last night, I was so unhappy; yet, all the same, I am not quite sure what I want. Life is so dull! That is what ails me, I think."

I looked at her in uncertainty as to her mood, but she left me in doubt, and began telling me about society at the Point, her friend Mrs. Woodruff, and the houseful of guests. She told me stories with some scandalous flavor about them, enough to give them a zest; she mimicked all the earnest people and spoke with contempt of all the shallow ones; she appeared to have fathomed all the petty under-currents which influenced people's actions, detected every shade of pretension and studied all the affectations and habits of the men and women she saw intimately. All this, too, without betraying any personal liking for one of them, and seeming to regard them all as mere puppets, to some of whom she attached herself when there was anything to gain, and from whom she withdrew herself when there was anything to lose. But she was too clever to allow me time to think what qualities of mind and heart lay behind this philosophy, and I was very much diverted.

"I must take you to see Mrs. Woodruff," she remarked. "You will be welcome in the set as flowers in May. You are spending the summer here, I suppose?"

"I have no plans. Where my mother is I shall be for the present, I have been separated from her so long."

"How beautiful! But about your future, Floyd? Have you a career decided upon, or are you to be a gentleman of leisure?"

I flushed: "My resolution is not taken as to what I shall be—certainly not an idle man."

"I can tell your fortune," she said in a low voice. "You need not cross my palm with silver for it, either."

"With gold, then?"

"I will tell it for love, but it is a golden fortune. You will marry Helen Floyd."

"No," said I with decision and some anger, "I shall never marry Helen. You do me too much honor. She would never look at me; and if she would there is something within me which forbids my marrying a rich woman. But it is nonsense. For Heaven's sake don't allude to it again! The man who marries her will be, to my thinking, the most fortunate of men, but—"

"We won't talk about it," said she good-naturedly. "There comes Mr. Thorpe to bid us good-morning. Astonishing how well he likes the walk to The Headlands!"

It was Thorpe indeed, carelessly but irreproachably dressed as usual, and looking at us with a smile of internal amusement, which he was probably too well-bred to express in words, for he merely drawled a good-morning and remarked on the beauty of the day.

"You're a famous pedestrian in these days, Thorpe," I said, rising with a trifle of embarrassment from my seat as close to Miss Lenox's as the rocks permitted, "and an early riser too. When I got up this morning at half-past six I told myself that I should see nobody for three hours at least, yet both Miss Lenox and you equal me in my love for the early morning hours."

But Thorpe was indifferent, and I saw at once that his mind was too preoccupied to allow of his wasting a thought upon the reason of my rising earlier than usual. "If you got up at half-past six," said he coolly, looking at his watch, "you must be ready for your breakfast, for it is a quarter to nine."

"I shall go in," remarked Georgy, rising and shaking out her white skirts and putting herself to rights generally after the manner in which birds and women plume themselves. "Did you come to breakfast, Mr. Thorpe?" she inquired with bare civility.

"I thought of dropping in," he returned; and as I assisted Miss Lenox up the ledge I turned to see if he were following us. He seemed to be waiting, however, for us to get away, and when I gained another distant glimpse of him he was apparently searching for something in a crevice of the rocks. Yet we were scarcely on the back piazza, before he had rejoined us in high spirits, and I was conscious of a gleam in his eyes which I had never seen before.

I could not resist speculations upon the reasons of his intimacy at the house, but dismissed them all as idle, for I knew very well that the habits of a young man at a watering-place are made by the necessity of filling up the hours of the day with occupation. The cottagers have perfect leisure as a rule, and with amiable, courteous ways press upon all acquaintances an incessant hospitality; and Thorpe, always frivolous, had at once fallen into the general way. Here at The Headlands the house was still under the shadow of deep mourning, but his old acquaintance with Mr. Floyd and my mother made his frequent visits admissible. At any rate, beyond Mr. Floyd's unobtrusive sarcasm at his expense, I heard no objections to Thorpe's dropping in to breakfast. Mills brought him a plate, and he himself chose a seat at Helen's left hand, and devoted himself to her service in a way that I knew bored her immeasurably. He sugared her strawberries and creamed them generously, and she sent them to her parrot. "I will take some more strawberries, Mills," she said then, and treated Thorpe's further attempts to serve her with chilly disdain.