"That must have been the crowd I saw in the streets when I sighted the town," said Lynde, thinking aloud.
"If you saw persons in the street," returned the doctor, "they were not the townsfolk. They kept very snug, I assure you. But permit me to finish, Mr."—
"My name is Lynde."
"Morton," continued the doctor, bowing, "having secured several volunteers before reaching G—, decided to return with what force he had, knowing that every instant was precious. On his way back he picked up three of the poor wanderers, and, unluckily, picked up you."
"He should not have committed such a stupid error," said Lynde, clinging stoutly to his grievance. "He ought to have seen that I was not an inmate of the asylum."
"An attendant, my dear Mr. Lynde, is not necessarily familiar with all the patients; he may know only those in his special ward. Besides, you were bare-headed and running, and seemed in a state of great cerebral excitement."
"I was chasing a man who had stolen my property."
"Morton and the others report that you behaved with great violence."
"Of course I did. I naturally resented being seized and bound."
"Your natural violence confirmed them in their natural suspicion, you see. Assuredly they were to blame; but the peculiar circumstances must plead for them."
"But when I spoke to them calmly and rationally"—
"My good sir," interrupted the doctor, "if sane people always talked as rationally and sensibly as some of the very maddest of my poor friends sometimes do, there would be fewer foolish things said in the world. What remark is that the great poet puts into the mouth of Polonius, speaking of Hamlet? 'How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.' My dear Mr. Lynde, it was your excellent good sense that convicted you! By the way, I believe you claimed the horse which Morton found adrift on the road."
"Yes, sir, it was mine; at least I was riding it this morning when the saddle-girth broke, and the mare got away from me."
"Then of course that was your saddle Blaisdell was running off with."
"Blaisdell?"
"One of our most dangerous patients, in fact, the only really dangerous patient at present in the establishment. Yet you should hear HIM talk sometimes! To-day, thank God, he happened to be in his ship-building mood. Otherwise—I dare not think what he might have done. I should be in despair if he had not been immediately retaken. Oddly enough, all the poor creatures, except three, returned to the asylum of their own will, after a brief ramble through the village."
"And the white-haired old gentleman who looked like a clergyman, is he mad?"
"Mackenzie? Merely idiotic," replied the doctor, with the cool professional air.
"And the young girl," asked Lynde hesitatingly, "is she"—
"A very sad case," interrupted Dr. Pendegrast, with a tenderer expression settling upon his countenance. "The saddest thing in the world."
"Insane?"
"Hopelessly so, I fear."
A nameless heaviness fell upon Lynde's heart. He longed to ask other questions, but he did not know how to shape them. He regretted that subsequently.
"And now, Mr. Lynde," said the doctor, "in your general pardon I wish you to include my unavoidable delay in coming or sending to you. When you were brought here I was still in durance vile, and Higgins was in his strait-jacket. On being released, my hands were full, as you can suppose. Moreover, I did not learn at once of your detention. The saddle and the valise caused me to suspect that a blunder had been committed. I cannot adequately express my regrets. In ten minutes," continued Dr. Pendegrast, turning a fat gold watch over on its back in the palm of his hand, where it looked like a little yellow turtle, "in ten minutes dinner will be served. Unless you do me the honor to dine with me, I shall not believe in the sincerity of your forgiveness."
"Thanks," said Lynde dejectedly. "I fully appreciate your thoughtfulness; I am nearly famished, but I do not think I could eat a mouthful here. Excuse me for saying it, but I should have to remain here permanently if I were to stay another hour. I quite forgive Mr. Morton and the others," Lynde went on, rising and giving the doctor his hand; "and I forgive you also, since you insist upon being forgiven, though I do not know for what. If my horse, and my traps, and my hat—really, I don't see how they could have helped taking me for a lunatic—can be brought together, I will go and dine at the tavern."
Half an hour afterward Edward Lynde dismounted at the steps of the rustic hotel. The wooden shutters were down now, and the front door stood hospitably open. A change had come over the entire village. There were knots of persons at the street corners and at garden gates, discussing the event of the day. There was also a knot of gossips in the hotel barroom to whom the landlord, Mr. Zeno Dodge, was giving a thrilling account of an attack made on the tavern by a maniac who had fancied himself a horse!
"The critter," cried Mr. Dodge dramatically, "was on the p'int of springin' up the piazzy, when Martha handed me the shot-gun."
Mr. Dodge was still in a heroic attitude, with one arm stretched out to receive the weapon and his eye following every movement of a maniac obligingly personated by the cuspidor between the windows, when Lynde entered. Mr. Dodge's arm slowly descended to his side, his jaw fell, and the narrative broke off short.
Lynde requested dinner in a private room, and Mr. Dodge deposed the maid in order to bring in the dishes himself and scrutinize his enigmatical guest. In serving the meal the landlord invented countless pretexts to remain in the room. After a while Lynde began to feel it uncomfortable to have those sharp green eyes continually boring into the back of his head.
"Yes," he exclaimed wearily, "I am the man."
"I thought you was. Glad to see you, sir," said Mr. Dodge politely.
"This morning you took me for an escaped lunatic?"
"I did so—fust-off."
"A madman who imagined himself a horse?"
"That's what I done," said Mr. Dodge contritely, "an' no wonder, with that there saddle. They're a very queer lot, them crazy chaps. There's one on 'em up there who calls himself Abraham Lincoln, an' then there's another who thinks he's a telegraph wire an' hes messages runnin' up an' down him continally. These is new potatoes, sir—early rosers. There's no end to their cussed kinks. When I see you prancin' round under the winder with that there saddle, I says at once to Martha, 'Martha, here's a luny!'"
"A very natural conclusion," said Lynde meekly.
"Wasn't it now?"
"And if you had shot me to death," said Lynde, helping himself to another chop, "I should have been very much obliged to you."
Mr. Dodge eyed the young man dubiously for a dozen seconds or so.
"Comin'! comin'!" cried Mr. Dodge, in response to a seemingly vociferous call which had failed to reach Lynde's ear.
When Edward Lynde had finished dinner, Mary was brought to the door. Under the supervision of a group of spectators assembled on the piazza, Lynde mounted, and turned the mare's head directly for Rivermouth. He had no heart to go any farther due north. The joyousness had dropped out of the idle summer journey. He had gone in search of the picturesque and the peculiar; he had found them—and he wished he had not.
On the comb of the hill where his adventure had begun and culminated—it seemed to him now like historic ground—Edward Lynde reined in Mary, to take a parting look at the village nestled in the plain below. Already the afternoon light was withdrawing from the glossy chestnuts and drooping elms, and the twilight—it crept into the valley earlier than elsewhere—was weaving its half invisible webs under the eaves and about the gables of the houses. But the two red towers of the asylum reached up into the mellow radiance of the waning sun, and stood forth boldly. They were the last objects his gaze rested upon, and to them alone his eyes sent a farewell.
"Poor little thing! poor little Queen of Sheba!" he said softly. Then the ridge rose between him and the village, and shut him out forever.
Nearly a mile beyond the spot where Mary had escaped from him that morning, Edward Lynde drew up the mare so sharply that she sunk back on her haunches. He dismounted in haste, and stooping down, with the rein thrown over one arm, picked up an object lying in the middle of the road under the horse's very hoofs.
It was on a Tuesday morning that Lynde reentered Rivermouth, after an absence of just eight days. He had started out fresh and crisp as a new bank-note, and came back rumpled and soiled and tattered, like that same note in a state to be withdrawn from circulation. The shutters were up at all the shop-windows in the cobble-paved street, and had the appearance of not having been taken down since he left. Everything was unchanged, yet it seemed to Lynde that he had been gone a year.
On Wednesday morning when Mr. Bowlsby came down to the bank he was slightly surprised at seeing the young cashier at his accustomed desk. To Mr. Bowlsby's brief interrogations then, and to Miss Mildred Bowlsby's more categorical questions in the evening, Lynde offered no very lucid reason for curtailing his vacation. Travelling alone had not been as pleasant as he anticipated; the horse was a nuisance to look after; and then the country taverns were snuffy and unendurable. As to where he had been and what he had seen—he must have seen something and been somewhere in eight days—his answers were so evasive that Miss Mildred was positive something distractingly romantic had befallen the young man.
"If you must know," he said, one evening, "I will tell you where I went."
"Tell me, then!"
"I went to Constantinople."
Miss Mildred found that nearly impertinent.
There was, too, an alteration in Lynde's manner which cruelly helped to pique her curiosity. His frank, half satirical, but wholly amiable way—an armor that had hitherto rendered him invulnerable to Miss Mildred's coquettish shafts—was wanting; he was less ready to laugh than formerly, and sometimes in the midst of company he fell into absent-minded moods. Instead of being the instigator and leader of picnics up the river, he frequently pleaded bank duties as an excuse for not joining such parties. "He is not at all as nice as he used to be," was Miss Mildred's mental summing up of Lynde a fortnight after his return.
He was, in fact, unaccountably depressed by his adventure in the hill country; he could not get it out of his mind. The recollection of details which he had not especially remarked at the time came to him in the midst of his work at the bank. Sometimes when he turned off the gas at night, or just as he was falling asleep, the sharp, attenuated figure of the ship-builder limned itself against the blackness of the chamber, or the old gentleman's vacuous countenance in its frame of silver hair peered in through the hangings of the bed. But more frequently it was the young girl's face that haunted Lynde. He saw her as she came up the sunny road, swinging the flower in her hand, and looking like one of Fra Angelico's seraphs or some saint out of an illuminated mediaeval missal; then he saw her seated on the horse, helpless and piteous with the rude, staring men about her. If he dreamed, it was of her drawing herself up haughtily and saying, "I am the Queen of Sheba." On two or three nights, when he had not been dreaming, he was startled out of his slumber by a voice whispering close to his ear: "I know you, too, very well. You are my husband."
Mr. Bowlsby and his daughter were the only persons in Rivermouth to whom Lynde could have told the story of his journey. He decided not to confide it to either, since he felt it would be vain to attempt to explain the sombre effect which the whole affair had had on him.
"I do not understand what makes me think of that poor girl all the time," mused Lynde one day, as he stood by the writing-table in his sitting-room. "It can't be this that keeps her in my mind."
He took up a slipper which was lying on the table in the midst of carved pipes and paper-weights and odds and ends. It was a very small slipper, nearly new, with high pointed heel and a square jet buckle at the instep: evidently of foreign make, and cut after the arch pattern of the slippers we see peeping from the flowered brocade skirts of Sir Peter Lely's full-length ladies. It was such an absurd shoe, a toy shoe, a child might have worn it!
"It cannot be this," said Lynde.
And yet it was that, more or less. Lynde had taken the slipper from his valise the evening he got home, and set it on the corner of the desk, where it straightway made itself into a cunning ornament. The next morning he put it into one of the drawers; but the table looked so barren and commonplace without it that presently the thing was back again. There it had remained ever since.
It met his eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own; there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle sparkled with a sort of intelligence. Sitting at night, reading under the drop-light, Lynde often had an odd sensation as if the little shoe would presently come tripping across the green table-cloth towards him. He had a hundred fanciful humors growing out of that slipper. Sometimes he was tempted to lock it up or throw it away. Sometimes he would say to himself, half mockingly and half sadly, "That is your wife's slipper;" then he would turn wholly sad, thinking how tragic that would be if it were really so.
It was a part of the girl's self; it had borne her lovely weight; it still held the impress of her foot; it would not let Lynde entirely forget her while it was under his eyes.
The slipper had stood on the writing-table four or five months—an object of consuming curiosity and speculation to the young woman who dusted Lynde's chambers—when an incident occurred which finally led to its banishment.
Lynde never had visitors; there were few men of his age in the town, and none was sufficiently intimate with him to come to his rooms; but it chanced one evening that a young man named Preston dropped in to smoke a cigar with Lynde. Preston had recently returned from abroad, where he had been an attache of the American Legation at London, and was now generally regarded as the prospective proprietor of Miss Mildred. He was an entertaining, mercurial young fellow, into whose acquaintanceship Lynde had fallen at the Bowlsbys'.
"Ah, you rogue!" cried Preston gayly, picking up the slipper. "Did she give it you?"
"Who?" asked Lynde, with a start.
"Devilish snug little foot! Was it a danseuse?"
"No," returned Lynde freezingly.
"An actress?"
"No," said Lynde, taking the slipper from Preston's hand and gently setting it back on the writing-table. "It was not an actress; and yet she played a role—in a blacker tragedy than any you ever saw on the stage."
"Lynde, I beg your pardon. I spoke thoughtlessly, supposing it a light matter, don't you see?"
"There was no offence," said Lynde, hiding his subtile hurt.
"It was stupid in me," said Preston the next night, relating the incident to Miss Bowlsby. "I never once thought it might be a thing connected with the memory of his mother or sister, don't you see? I took it for a half sentimental souvenir of some flirtation."
"Mr. Lynde's mother died when he was a child, and he never had a sister," said Miss Bowlsby thoughtfully. "I shouldn't wonder," she added irrelevantly, after a pause.
"At what, Miss Mildred?"
"At anything!"
One of those womanly intuitions which set mere man-logic at defiance was come to whisper in Miss Bowlsby's ear that that slipper had performed some part in Edward Lynde's untold summer experience.
"He was laughing at you, Mr. Preston; he was grossly imposing on your unsophisticated innocence."
"Really? Is he as deep as that?"
"He is very deep," said Miss Bowlsby solemnly.
On his way home from the bank, one afternoon in that same week, Lynde overtook Miss Mildred walking, and accompanied her a piece down the street.
"Mr. Lynde, shall you go on another horseback excursion next summer?" she asked, without prelude.
"I haven't decided; but I think not."
"Of course you ought to go."
"Why of course, Miss Mildred?"
"Why? Because—because—don't ask me!"
"But I do ask you."
"You insist?"
"Positively."
"Well, then, how will you ever return Cinderella her slipper if you don't go in search of her?"
Lynde bit his lip, and felt that the blackest criminals of antiquity were as white as driven snow compared with Preston.
"The prince in the story, you know," continued Miss Bowlsby, with her smile of ingenue, "hunted high and low until he found her again."
"That prince was a very energetic fellow," said Lynde, hastily putting on his old light armor. "Possibly I should not have to travel so far from home," he added, with a bow. "I know at least one lady in Rivermouth who has a Cinderella foot."
"She has two of them, Mr. Lynde," responded Miss Mildred, dropping him a courtesy.
The poor little slipper's doom was sealed. The edict for its banishment had gone forth. If it were going to be the town's talk he could not keep it on his writing-desk. As soon as Lynde got back to his chambers, he locked up Cinderella's slipper in an old trunk in a closet seldom or never opened.
The enchantment, whatever it was, was broken. Although he missed the slipper from among the trifles scattered over his table, its absence brought him a kind of relief. He less frequently caught himself falling into brown studies. The details of his adventure daily grew more indistinct; the picture was becoming a mere outline; it was fading away. He might have been able in the course of time to set the whole occurrence down as a grotesque dream, if he had not now and then beheld Deacon Twombly driving by the bank with Mary attached to the battered family carry-all. Mary was a fact not easily disposed of.
Insensibly Lynde lapsed into his old habits. The latter part of this winter at Rivermouth was unusually gay; the series of evening parties and lectures and private theatricals extended into the spring, whose advent was signalized by the marriage of Miss Bowlsby and Preston. In June Lynde ran on to New York for a week, where he had a clandestine dinner with his uncle at Delmonico's, and bade good-by to Flemming, who was on the eve of starting on a protracted tour through the East. "I shall make it a point to visit the land of the Sabaeans," said Flemming, with his great cheery laugh, "and discover, if possible, the unknown site of the ancient capital of Sheba." Lynde had confided the story to his friend one night, coming home from the theatre.
Once more at Rivermouth, Edward Lynde took up the golden threads of his easy existence. But this life of ideal tranquillity and contentment was not to be permitted him. One morning in the latter part of August he received a letter advising him that his uncle had had an alarming stroke of apoplexy. The letter was followed within the hour by a telegram announcing the death of David Lynde.
In the early twilight of a July evening in the year 1875, two young Americans, neither dreaming of the other's presence, came face to face on the steps of a hotel on the Quai du Montblanc at Geneva. The two men, one of whom was so bronzed by Eastern suns that his friend looked pallid beside him, exchanged a long, incredulous stare; then their hands met, and the elder cried out, "Of all men in the world!"
"Flemming!" exclaimed the other eagerly; "I thought you were in Egypt."
"So I was, a month ago. What are you doing over here, Ned?"
"I don't know, to tell the truth."
"You don't know!" laughed Flemming. "Enjoying yourself, I suppose."
"The supposition is a little rash," said Edward Lynde. "I have been over nearly a year—quite a year, in fact. After uncle David's death"—
"Poor old fellow! I got the news at Smyrna."
"After he was gone, and the business of the estate was settled, I turned restless at Rivermouth. It was cursedly lonesome. I hung on there awhile, and then I came abroad."
"A rich man—my father wrote me. I have had no letter's from you. Your uncle treated you generously, Ned."
"Did he not always treat me generously?" said Lynde, with a light coming into his face and instantly dying out again. "Yes, he left me a pile of money and a heart-ache. I can hardly bear to talk of it even now, and it will be two years this August. But come up to my room. By Jove, I am glad to see you! How is it you are in Geneva? I was thinking about you yesterday, and wondering whether you were drifting down the Nile in a dahabeeah, or crossing the desert on a dromedary. Of course you have hunted tigers and elephants: did you kill anything?"
"I haven't killed anything but time. I was always a dead shot at that."
Lynde passed his arm through Flemming's, and the two friends mounted the staircase of the hotel.
"How is it you are in Geneva?" repeated Lynde.
"By luck," answered Flemming. "I am going home—in a zigzag way. I've been obliged to take a reef in my Eastern itinerary. The fact is, I have had a letter from the old gentleman rather suggesting it. I believe he has availed himself of my absence to fall into financial difficulties."
"Why, I thought he was rolling in wealth."
"No, he is rolling in poverty, as nearly as I can make out. Well, not so bad as that. Nothing is ever as bad as it pretends to be. But he has met with heavy losses. I shall find letters in London and learn all about it. He wrote me not to hurry, that a month or two would make no difference. When I got to Munich I thought I would take a peep at Switzerland while I had the opportunity. I have done a good piece—from Lindau to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Martigny by way of the Furca; through the Tete Noire Pass to Chamouni, and from Chamouni, here."
While Flemming was speaking, Lynde unlocked a door at the end of the hall and ushered him into a sitting-room with three windows, each opening upon a narrow balcony of its own.
"Sit there, old fellow," said Lynde, wheeling an easy-chair to the middle window, "and look through my glass at the view before it takes itself off. It is not often as fine as it is this evening."
In front of the hotel the blue waters of the Rhone swept under the arches of the Pont des Bergues, to lose themselves in the turbid, glacier-born Arve, a mile below the town. Between the Pont des Bergues and the Pont du Montblanc lay the island of Jean Jacques Rousseau, linked to the quay by a tiny chain bridge. Opposite, upon the right bank of the Rhone, stretched the handsome facades of tile-roofed buildings, giving one an idea of the ancient quarter which a closer inspection dispels; for the streets are crooked and steep, and the houses, except those lining the quays, squalid. It was not there, however, that the eye would have lingered. Far away, seen an incredible distance in the transparent evening atmosphere, Mont Blanc and its massed group of snowy satellites lifted themselves into the clouds. All those luminous battlements and turrets and pyramids—the Mole, the Grandes Jorasses, the Aiguilles du Midi, the Dent du Geant, the Aiguilles d'Argentiere—were now suffused with a glow so magically delicate that the softest tint of the blush rose would have seemed harsh and crude in comparison.
"You have to come away from Mont Blanc to see it," said Flemming, lowering the glass. "When I had my nose against it at Chamouni I didn't see it at all. It overhung me and smothered me. Old boy"—reaching up his hand to Lynde who was leaning on the back of the chair—"who would ever have thought that we two"—Flemming stopped short and looked earnestly into his comrade's face. "Why, Ned, I didn't notice how thin and pale you are. Are you ill?"
The color which had mantled Lynde's cheeks in the first surprise and pleasure of meeting his friend had passed away, leaving, indeed, a somewhat haggard expression on the young man's countenance.
"Ill? Not that I know."
"Is anything wrong?"
"There is nothing wrong," replied Lynde, with some constraint. "That is to say, nothing very wrong. For a month or six weeks I have been occupied with a matter that has rather unsettled me—more, perhaps, than I ought to have allowed."
"What is that?"
"It doesn't signify. Don't let's speak of it."
"But it does signify. You are keeping something serious from me. Out with it."
"Well, the truth is," said Lynde after a moment's hesitation, "it IS something serious and nothing very positive: that's the perplexing part of it."
"You are not making it clear to me."
"I don't know that I can, Flemming."
"Try, then."
Lynde reflected a few seconds, with his eyes fixed on the remote mountain lines imperceptibly melting into the twilight. "Do you remember our walk home from the theatre, one night, two or three days before you sailed from New York?"
"Perfectly," replied Flemming.
"Do you recollect my telling you of a queer thing that happened to me up in the New Hampshire hills?"
"Your encounter with the little lunatic? Perfectly."
"Don't!" said Lynde, shrinking as if some sharp instrument had pierced him. "She is here!"
"Here!" exclaimed Flemming, half rising from the chair, and glancing towards a draped door which connected the suite of apartments.
"Not in these rooms," said Lynde, with a short laugh, "but inGeneva—in this hotel."
"You do not mean it."
"When I say it is she, I'm not sure of it."
"Of course it isn't."
"That's what I say, and the next moment I know it is."
"And is THIS your trouble?"
"Yes," answered Lynde, knitting his brows. "I felt that I shouldn't make it clear to you."
"I am afraid you haven't, Ned. What earthly difference does it make to you whether or not it's the same girl?"
"What difference!" cried Lynde impetuously; "what difference—when I love the very ground she walks on!"
"Oh, you love her! Which one?"
"Don't laugh at me, Flemming."
"I am not laughing," said Flemming, looking puzzled and anxious. "It is not possible, Ned, you have allowed yourself to go and get interested in a—a person not right in her mind!"
"Miss Denham is as sane as you are."
"Then Miss—Denham, is it?—cannot be the girl you told me about."
"That's the point."
"I don't see why there should be any confusion on that point."
"Don't you?"
"Come, let us go to the bottom of this. You have fallen in with a woman in Switzerland, and you suspect her of being a girl you met years ago in New Hampshire under circumstances which render her appearance here nearly an impossibility. As I am not a man of vivid imagination, that floors me. What makes you think them identical?"
"A startling personal resemblance, age, inflection of voice, manner, even a certain physical peculiarity—a scar."
"Then what makes you doubt?"
"Everything."
"Well, that's comprehensive, at all events."
"The very fact of her being here. The physician at the asylum said that that girl's malady was hopeless. Miss Denham has one of the clearest intellects I ever knew; she is a linguist, an accomplished musician, and, what is more rare, a girl who has moved a great deal in society, or, at least, has travelled a great deal, and has not ceased to be an unaffected, fresh, candid girl."
"An American?"
"Of course; didn't I say so?"
"The other may have been a sister, then, or a cousin," suggested Flemming. "That would account for the likeness, which possibly you exaggerate. It was in 1872, wasn't it?"
"I have been all over that. Miss Denham is an only child; she never had a cousin. To-day she is precisely what the other would have been, with restored health and three years added to her seventeen or eighteen."
"Upon my word, Ned, this is one of the oddest things I ever heard. I feel, though, that you have got yourself into an unnecessary snarl. Where does Miss Denham come from? She is not travelling alone? How did you meet her? Tell me the entire story."
"There is nothing to tell, or next to nothing. I met the Denhams here, six weeks ago. It was at the table d'hote. Two ladies came in and took places opposite me—a middle-aged lady and a young one. I did not notice them until they were seated; it was the voice of the younger lady that attracted me; I looked up,—and there was the Queen of Sheba. The same eyes, the same hair, the same face, though not so pale, and fuller; the same form, only the contours filled out. I put down my knife and fork and stared at her. She flushed, for I fancy I stared at her rather rudely, and a faint mark, like a star, came into her cheek and faded. I saw it as distinctly as I saw it the day she passed me on the country road, swinging the flower in her hand."
"By Jove! it's a regular romance—strawberry mark and all."
"If you don't take this seriously," said Lynde, frowning, "I am done."
"Go on."
"I shall never know how I got through the endless courses of that dinner; it was an empty pantomime on my part. As soon as it was over I rushed to the hotel register. The only entry among the new arrivals which pointed to the two ladies was that of Mrs. William Denham and Niece, United States. You can understand, Flemming, how I was seized with a desire to know those two women. I had come to Geneva for a day or so; but I resolved to stay here a month if they stayed, or to leave the next hour if they left. In short, I meant to follow them discreetly; it was an occupation for me. They remained. In the course of a week I knew the Denhams to speak to them when we met of a morning in the English Garden. A fortnight later it seemed to me that I had known them half my life. They had come across the previous November, they had wintered in Italy, and were going to Chamouni some time in July, where Mr. Denham was to join them; then they were to make an extended tour of Switzerland, accompanied by an old friend of the family, a professor, or a doctor, or something, who was in the south of France for his health. Miss Denham—her name is Ruth—is an orphan, and was educated mostly over here. When the Denhams are at home they live somewhere in the neighborhood of Orange, New Jersey. There are all the simple, exasperating facts. I can add nothing to them. If I were to tell you how this girl has perplexed and distressed me, by seeming to be and seeming not to be that other person—how my doubts and hopes have risen and fallen from day to day, even from hour to hour—it would be as uninteresting to you as a barometrical record. But this is certain: when Miss Denham and I part at Chamouni, as I suppose we shall, this world will have come to an end so far as I am concerned."
"The world doesn't come to an end that way—when one is twenty-six.Does she like you, Ned?"
"How can I say? She does not dislike me. We have seen very much of each other. We have been together some portion of each day for more than a month. But I've never had her a moment alone; the aunt is always present. We are like old friends—with a difference."
"I see; the aunt makes the difference! No flirting allowed on the premises."
"Miss Denham is not a girl to flirt with; she is very self-possessed, with just a suspicion of haughtiness; personally, tall, slight, a sort of dusky Eastern beauty, with the clear warm colors of a New England September twilight—not like the brunettes on this side, who are apt to have thick complexions, saving their presence. I say she is not a girl to flirt with, and yet, with that sensitive-cut mouth and those deep eyes, she could do awful things in the way of tenderness if she had a mind to. She's a puzzle, with her dove's innocence and her serpent's wisdom. All women are problems. I suppose every married man of us goes down to his grave with his particular problem not quite solved."
Flemming gave a loud laugh. The "every married man of us" tickled him. "Yes," said he; "they are all daughters of the Sphinx, and past finding out. Is Miss Denham an invalid?" he asked, after a pause.
"No; she is not strong—delicate, rather; of the pure type of American young-womanhood—more spirit than physique; but not an invalid—unless"—
"You have let a morbid fancy run away with you, Ned. This lady and the other one are two different persons."
"If I could only believe it!" said Lynde. "I do believe it at times; then some gesture, some fleeting expression, a turn of the head, the timbre of her voice—and there she is again! The next moment I am ready to laugh at myself."
"Couldn't you question the aunt?"
"How could I?"
"You couldn't!"
"I have thought of that doctor at the asylum—what in the devil was his name? I might write to him; but I shrink from doing it. I have been brutal enough in other ways. I am ashamed to confess to what unforgivable expedients I have resorted to solve my uncertainty. Once we were speaking of Genoa, where the Denhams had spent a week; I turned the conversation on the church of St. Lorenzo and the relic in the treasury there—the Sacra Catino, a supposed gift to Solomon from the Queen of Sheba. Miss Denham listened with the calmest interest; she had not seen it the day she visited the church; she was sorry to have missed that. Then the aunt changed the subject, but whether by accident or design I was unable for the soul of me to conjecture. Good God, Flemming! could this girl have had some terrible, swift malady which touched her and passed, and still hangs over her—an hereditary doom?"
"Then she's the most artful actress that ever lived, I should say. The leading lady of the Theatre Francais might go and take lessons of her. But if that were so, Ned?"
"If that were so," said Lynde slowly, "a great pity would be added to my love."
"You would not marry her!"
Lynde made no reply.
The night had settled down upon Geneva while the friends were talking. The room was so dark they could not distinguish each other; but Flemming was conscious of a pale, set face turned towards him in the obscurity, in the same way that he was conscious of the forlorn whiteness of Mont Blanc looming up out yonder, unseen. It was dark in the chamber, but the streets were gay now with the life of a midsummer night. Interminable lines of lamps twinkled on the bridges and along the quays; the windows of the cafes on the opposite bank of the Rhone were brilliant with gas jets; boats, bearing merry cargoes to and from the lake, passed up and down the river; the street running under the hotel balcony was crowded with loungers, and a band was playing in the English Garden. From time to time a strain of music floated up to the window where the two men were sitting. Neither had spoken for some minutes, when Lynde asked his friend where he was staying.
"At the Schweizerhof," replied Flemming. "I always take the hotel nearest the station. Few Americans go there, I fancy. It is wonderfully and fearfully Swiss. I was strolling in here to look through the register for some American autographs when I ran against you."
"You had better bring your traps over here."
"It would not be worth while. I am booked for Paris to-morrow night.Ned—come with me!"
"I can't, Flemming; I have agreed to go to Chamouni with the Denhams."
"Don't!"
"That is like advising a famishing man not to eat his last morsel of food. I have a presentiment it will all end there. I never had a presentiment before."
"I had a presentiment once," said Flemming impressively. "I had a presentiment that a certain number—it was number twenty-seven—would draw the prize in a certain lottery. I went to the office, and number twenty-seven was one of the two numbers unsold! I bought it as quick as lightning, I dreamed of number twenty-seven three successive nights, and the next day it drew a blank."
"That has the ring of the old Flemming!" cried Lynde, with an unforced laugh. "I am glad that I have not succeeded in turning all your joyous gold into lead. I'm not always such dull company as I have been to-night, with my moods and my presentiments. I owe them partly, perhaps, to not seeing Miss Denham to-day, the aunt having a headache."
"You were not in a rollicking humor when I picked you up."
"I had been cruising about town all the morning alone, making assaults on the Musee Fol, the Botanic Garden, and the Jewish Synagogue. In the afternoon I had wrecked myself on Rousseau's Island, where I sat on a bench staring at Pradier's poor statue of Jean Jacques until I fancied that the ugly bronze cannibal was making mouths at me. When the aunt has a headache,Isuffer. Flemming, you must see Miss Denham, if only for a moment."
"Of course I should like to see her, Ned."
"You do not leave until evening," Lynde said, reflecting. "I think I can manage a little dinner for to-morrow. Now let us take a breath of fresh air. I know the queerest old nook, in the Rue de Chantpoulet, where the Bavarian beer is excellent and all the company smoke the most enormous porcelain pipes. Haven't I hit one of your weaknesses?"
"You have hit a brace!"
When Edward Lynde returned to the hotel that night, after parting with Flemming at the head of a crooked, gable-hung street leading to the Schweizerhof, the young man regretted that he had said anything on the subject of the Denhams, or rather, that he had spoken of the painful likeness which had haunted him so persistently. The friends had spent the gayest of evenings together at a small green-topped table in one corner of the smoky cafe. Over their beer and cheese they had chatted of old days at boarding-school and college, and this contact with the large, healthy nature of Flemming, which threw off depression as sunshine dissipates mist, had sent Lynde's vapors flying. Nothing was changed in the circumstances that had distressed him, yet some way a load had removed itself from his bosom. He was sorry he had mentioned that dark business at all. As he threaded the deserted streets—it was long after midnight—he planned a dinner to be given in his rooms the next day, and formulated a note of invitation to the ladies, which he would write when he got back to the hotel, and have in readiness for early delivery in the morning.
Lynde was in one of those lightsome moods which, in that varying month, had not unfrequently followed a day of doubt and restless despondency. As he turned into the Quai des Bergues he actually hummed a bar or two of opera. He had not done that before in six weeks. They had been weeks of inconceivable torment and pleasure to Lynde.
He had left home while still afflicted by David Lynde's death. Since the uncle's ill-advised marriage the intercourse between them, as the reader knows, had all but ceased; they had met only once, and then as if to bid each other farewell; but the ties had been very close, after all. In the weeks immediately following his guardian's death, the young man, occupied with settling the estate, of which he was one of the executors, scarcely realized his loss; but when he returned to Rivermouth a heavy sense of loneliness came over him. The crowded, happy firesides to which he was free seemed to reproach him for his lack of kinship; he stood alone in the world; there was no more reason why he should stay in one place than in another. His connection with the bank, unnecessary now from a money point of view, grew irksome; the quietude of the town oppressed him; he determined to cut adrift from all and go abroad. An educated American with no deeper sorrow than Lynde's cannot travel through Europe, for the first time at least, with indifference. Three months in Germany and France began in Lynde a cure which was completed by a winter in Southern Italy. He had regained his former elasticity of spirits and was taking life with a relish, when he went to Geneva; there he fell in with the Denhams in the manner he described to Flemming. An habitual shyness, and perhaps a doubt of Flemming's sympathetic capacity, had prevented Lynde from giving his friend more than an outline of the situation. In his statement Lynde had omitted several matters which may properly be set down here.
That first day at the table d'hote and the next day, when he was able more deliberately to study the young woman, Edward Lynde had made no question to himself as to her being the same person he had seen in so different and so pathetic surroundings. It was unmistakably the same. He had even had a vague apprehension she might recognize him, and had been greatly relieved to observe that there was no glimmer of recognition in the well-bred, careless glance which swept him once or twice. No, he had passed out of her memory—with the other shapes and shadows! How strange they should meet again, thousands of miles from New England; how strange that he alone, of all the crowded city, should know there had been a dark episode in this girl's history! What words she had spoken to him and forgotten, she who now sat there robed in the beauty of her reason!
It was a natural interest, and a deep interest, certainly, that impelled Lynde to seek the acquaintance of the two ladies. On the third day a chance service rendered the elder—she had left a glove or a handkerchief beside her plate at table, and Lynde had followed her with it from the dining-room—placed him upon speaking terms. They were his country-women, he was a gentleman, and the surface ice was easily broken. Three days afterwards Lynde found himself oddly doubting his first conviction. This was not that girl! The likeness was undeniable: the same purple-black hair, the same long eyelashes, a very distinctive feature. In voice and carriage, too, Miss Denham curiously recalled the other; and that mark on Miss Denham's cheek—a birth-mark—was singular enough. But there the analogies ended. Miss Denham was a young woman who obviously had seen much of the world; she possessed accomplishments which could have been acquired only by uninterrupted application; she spoke French, German, and Italian with unusual purity. That intellect, as strong and clear as crystal, could never have suffered even a temporary blur. He was beginning to be amazed at the blunder he had committed, when suddenly, one evening, a peculiar note in her voice, accompanied by a certain lifting of the eyelashes—a movement he had noticed for the first time, but which was familiar to him—threw Lynde into great perplexity. It WAS that other girl! How useless for him to try to blind himself to the truth! Besides, why should he wish to, and why should the fact of the identity trouble him to such a degree? The next day he was staggered by Miss Denham alluding incidentally to the circumstance that she and her aunt had passed a part of the spring of 1872 in Florida. That was the date of Lynde's adventure, the spring of 1872. Here was almost positive proof that Miss Denham could not have been in New England at the time. Lynde did not know what to think. Of course he was mistaken; he must be mistaken—and yet! There were moments when he could not look at Miss Denham without half expecting to see the man Blaisdell flitting somewhere in the background. Then there were days when it was impossible for Lynde to picture her as anything different from what she now was. But whatever conclusion he came to, a doubt directly insinuated itself.
While he was drifting from one uncertainty to another, a fortnight elapsed in which his intimacy with the Denhams had daily increased. They were in Geneva for an indefinite time, awaiting directions from Mr. Denham. The few sights in the city had been exhausted; the places of interest in the environs could not be visited by ladies without escort; so it fell out that Lynde accompanied the Denhams on several short excursions—to Petit and Grand Sacconnex, to the Villa Tronchin, to Pregny and Mornex. These were days which Lynde marked with a red letter. At the end of the month, however, he was in the same state of distressing indecision relative to Miss Denham. On one point he required no light—he was deeply interested in her, so deeply, indeed, that it had become a question affecting all his future, whether or not she was the person he had encountered on his horseback journey three years before. If she was—
But Edward Lynde had put the question out of his thought that night as he walked home from the cafe. His two bars of opera music lasted him to the hotel steps. Though it was late—a great bell somewhere, striking two, sent its rich reverberation across the lake while he was unlocking his chamber door—Lynde seated himself at a table and wrote his note to the Denhams.
Flemming had promised to come and take coffee with him early the next morning, that is to say at nine o'clock. Before Flemming arrived, Lynde's invitation had been despatched and accepted. He was re-reading Miss Denham's few lines of acceptance when he heard his friend, at the other end of the hall, approaching with great strides.
"The thousandth part of a minute late!" cried Flemming, throwing open the door. "There's no excuse for me. When a man lives in a city where they manufacture a hundred thousand watches a year—that's one watch and a quarter every five minutes day and night—it's a moral duty to be punctual. Ned, you look like a prize pink this morning."
"I have had such a sleep! Besides, I've just gone through the excitement of laying out the menu for our dinner. Good heavens, I forgot the flowers! We'll go and get them after breakfast. There's your coffee. Cream, old man? I am in a tremor over this dinner, you know. It is a maiden effort. By the way, Flemming, I wish you'd forget what I said about Miss Denham, last evening. I was all wrong."
"I told you so; what has happened?"
"Nothing. Only I have reconsidered the matter, and I see I was wrong to let it upset me."
"I saw that from the first."
"Some persons," said Lynde gayly, "always see everything from the first. You belong to the I-told-you-so family, only you belong to the cheerful branch."
"Thank the Lord for that! A wide-spreading, hopeful disposition is your only true umbrella in this vale of tears."
"I shall have to borrow yours, then, if it rains heavily, for I've none of my own."
"Take it, my boy; my name's on the handle!"
On finishing their coffee the young men lighted cigars and sallied forth for a stroll along the bank of the river, which they followed to the confluence of the Rhone with the Arve, stopping on the way to leave an order at a florist's. Returning to the hotel some time after mid-day, they found the flowers awaiting them in Lynde's parlor, where a servant was already laying the cloth. There were bouquets for the ladies' plates, an imposing centre-piece in the shape of a pyramid, and a profusion of loose flowers.
"What shall we do with these?" asked Lynde, pointing to the latter.
"Set 'em around somewhere," said Flemming, with cheerful vagueness.
Lynde disposed the flowers around the room to the best of his judgment; he hung some among the glass pendants of the chandelier, gave a nosegay to each of the two gilt statuettes in the corners, and piled the remainder about the base of a monumental clock on the mantelpiece.
"That's rather a pretty idea, isn't it?—wreathing Time in flowers," remarked Flemming, with honest envy of his friend's profounder depth of poetic sentiment.
"I thought it rather neat," said Lynde, who had not thought of it at all.
In the course of that dinner if two or three unexplained demure smiles flitted over Miss Denham's face, they might, perhaps, have been indirectly traced to these floral decorations, though they pleased her more than if a woman's hand had been visible in them.
"Flemming," said Lynde, with a severe aesthetic air, "I don't think that arrangement in the fireplace is quite up to the rest of the room."
"Nor I either," said Flemming, who had been silently admiring it for the last ten minutes.
The fireplace in question was stuffed with a quantity of long, delicately spiral shavings, sprinkled with silver spangles or flakes of isinglass, and covered by a piece of pale blue illusion. This device—peculiarly Genevese—was supposed to represent a waterfall.
"Take a match and touch it off," suggested Flemming.
"If we had some more flowers, now"—"Exactly. I am going to the hotel to get myself up like a head-waiter, and I'll bring some when I come back."
In an hour afterwards Flemming reappeared, followed by a youth bearing an immense basket. Lynde removed the Alpine waterfall to an adjoining chamber, and built up a huge fire of flame-colored flowers in the grate. The two friends were standing in the middle of the room, gravely contemplating the effect, when a servant opened the door and announced Mrs. and Miss Denham. A rustle of drapery at the threshold was followed by the entrance of the two ladies in ceremonious dinner toilets.
Lynde had never seen Miss Denham in any but a dark travelling-dress, or in such unobtrusive costume as a modest girl may wear at a hotel table. He stood motionless an instant, seeing her in a trailing robe of some fleecy, maize-colored material, with a cluster of moss-roses at her corsage and a cross of diamonds at her throat. She was without other ornament. The shade of her dress made her hair and eyes and complexion wonderful. Lynde was proud to have her look like that for Flemming, though he was himself affected by a queer impression that this queenly young person was not the simple, lovely girl he had known all along. He was embarrassed by her unexpected elegance, but he covered his embarrassment and his pleasure by presenting his friend to the ladies, and ordering the servant to serve the dinner immediately.
Lynde's constraint was only momentary, and the others had experienced none. Flemming, indeed, had a fleeting surprise at finding in the aunt a woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight, in the Indian summer of her beauty. Lynde had given him the idea of an elderly person with spectacles. As to Miss Denham, she had not fallen short of the mental picture Flemming had drawn of her—which ought to have surprised him. No charms or graces in a woman, however, could much surprise Flemming; he accepted them as matters of course; to him all women were charming in various degrees. He had that general susceptibility which preserves us the breed of bachelors. The constant victim of a series of minor emotions, he was safe from any major passion. There was a certain chivalrous air of camaraderie in his manner to women which made them like him sooner or later; the Denhams liked him instantly. Even before the potage was removed, Lynde saw that his dinner was a success. "The cook may drop dead now, if he wants to," said Lynde to himself; "he can't spoil anything."
"You are not entirely a stranger to us, Mr. Flemming," said Mrs. Denham, looking at him from behind the floral pyramid, which had the happy effect of isolating two guests who sat opposite each other. "There is a person who goes about foreign lands with no other ostensible mission than to sound your praise."
"You must set down a great deal to filial gratitude," returnedFlemming. "I have been almost a father to our young friend."
"He tells me that your being here is quite accidental."
"It was one of those fortunate things, madam, which sometimes befall undeserving persons, as if to refute the theory of a special providence."
"On the contrary, Mr. Flemming"—it was Miss Ruth who spoke—"it was evidently arranged with the clearest foresight; for if you had been a day later, perhaps you would not have found your friend in Geneva—that is, if Mr. Lynde goes with us to Chamouni."
"You have heard from Mr. Denham, then?" said Lynde, turning to the aunt.
"We had letters this morning. Mr. Denham is in Paris, where he will remain a week or ten days, to show the sights to an old American friend of ours who is to join our party. I think I told you, Mr. Lynde? Supposing us to be weary of Geneva by this time, Mr. Denham suggests that we go on to Chamouni and wait there. I have left the matter to Ruth, and she decides in favor of leaving to-morrow, if the weather is fine."
"We are not tired of Geneva," said Miss Denham; "it would be ingratitude to Mr. Lynde to admit that; but we are longing for a nearer view of the Mont Blanc groups. One ought to know them pretty well after six weeks' constant looking at them; but the changes in the atmosphere make any certain intimacy impossible at this distance. New ranges loom up and disappear, the lines alter almost every hour. Were you ever at the Isles of Shoals, Mr. Flemming?"
Flemming started slightly. Since Miss Denham entered the room, he had given scarcely a thought to Lynde's dismal suspicions. Once or twice they had come into Flemming's mind, but he had promptly dismissed them. The girl's inquiry concerning a locality in New Hampshire suddenly recalled them, and recalled the motive with which Lynde had planned the dinner. Flemming flushed with vexation to think he had lent himself to the arrangement.
"I have spent parts of two summers at the Isles of Shoals," he said.
"Then you must have observed the singular changes that seem to take place on the mainland, seen from Appledore. The mirage on the Rye and Newcastle coasts—is it Newcastle?—sometimes does wonderful things. Frequently you see great cities stretching along the beach, some of the houses rising out of the water, as in Venice, only they are gloomy, foggy cities, like London, and not like Venice. Another time you see ships sailing by upside down; then it is a chain of hills, with peaks and projections that melt away under your eyes, leaving only the flat coast-line."
Flemming had seen all this, and seemed again to see it through the clear medium of the young girl's words. He had witnessed similar optical illusions in the deserts, also, which he described to her. Then he remembered a curious trick of refracted light he had once seen in the sunrise on Mount Washington, and suddenly he found himself asking Miss Denham if she were acquainted with the interior of New Hampshire. Flemming had put the interrogation without a shadow of design; he could have bitten his tongue off an instant after.
Lynde, who had been discussing with Mrs. Denham the details of the next day's journey, looked up quickly and sent Flemming a rapid scowl.
"I have never been inland," was Miss Denham's answer. "My acquaintance with New Hampshire is limited to the Shoals and the beaches at Rye and Hampton. In visiting the Alps first I have, I know, been very impolite to the mountains and hills of my own land."
"Ruth, dear, Mr. Lynde and I have been speaking of the conveyance for to-morrow; shall it be an open or a close carriage?"
"An open carriage, by all means, aunt."
"That would have its inconvenience in case of showers," said Lynde; "when April takes her departure from the Alps, she is said to leave all her capriciousness behind her. I suggest a partially closed vehicle; you will find a covering comfortable in either rain or shine."
"Mr. Lynde thinks of everything," remarked Mrs. Denham. "He should not allow himself to be dictated to by unforeseeing woman."
"In strict confidence, Mrs. Denham, I will confess that I have arbitrarily taken this business in hand. For nearly a week, now, I have had my eye on a vehicle that must have been built expressly for us; it is driven by a tall, distinguished person, frosty of mustache and affable of manner—evidently a French marquis in disguise."
"What an adroit fellow Ned is!" Flemming said to himself. "I wonder that with all his cleverness he could have got such a foolish notion into his head about this girl."
"We must have the French marquis at any cost," said Miss Denham.
"The truth is," remarked Lynde, "I have secured him."
"We are to start at eight, Ruth."
"Which means breakfast at seven. Is Mr. Lynde equal to a feat like that, aunt?"
"As I intend to have watchers and sit up all night," said Lynde, "I think I can promise to be on hand."
This matter decided, the conversation, which had been carried on mostly in duets, became general. Flemming soon recovered from the remorse of his inadvertent question, or rather from his annoyance at the thought that possibly it had struck Lynde as having an ulterior motive.
As to Lynde, he was in the highest humor. Miss Denham had been thoroughly charming to his friend, with her serious and candid manner—a manner as far removed from reserve as from the thin vivacity of the average young woman of the period. Her rare smile had been finer than another's laugh. Flemming himself went as near to falling in love with her and the aunt as his loyalty to Lynde and the supposed existence of a Mr. Denham permitted.
After a while the window curtains were drawn, though it was scarcely dusk without, and candles brought; then the ices were served, and then the coffee; and then the clock on the mantelpiece, as if it took malicious satisfaction in the fleetness with which Time (wreathed in flowers) slips away from mortals, set up a silvery chime—it sounded like the angelus rung from some cathedral in the distance—to tell Flemming that his hour was come. He had still to return to the hotel to change his dress-suit before taking the train. Mrs. Denham insisted on Lynde accompanying his friend to the station, though Flemming had begged that he might be allowed to withdraw without disturbing the party, and even without saying farewell. "I don't recognize good-bys," said he; "there are too many sorrowful partings in the world already. I never give them the slightest encouragement." But the ladies persisted in considering the dinner at an end; then the two friends conducted the Denhams to the door of their own parlor and there took leave of them.
"Well?" said Lynde as he seated himself beside Flemming in the carriage. "What do you think of her?"
"An unusually agreeable woman," returned Flemming carelessly. "She is thirty-eight, she looks twenty-six, and is as pleasant as nineteen."
"I mean Miss Denham!"
"Ned, I don't care to discuss Miss Denham. When I think of your connecting that lovely lady with a crazy creature you met somewhere or other, I am troubled touching your intellect."
"But I do not any longer connect her with that unfortunate girl. I told you to put all that out of your mind."
"I don't find it easy to do, Ned; it is so monstrous. Was not this dinner an arrangement for me to see Miss Denham and in some way judge her?"
"No, Flemming; there was a moment yesterday evening when I had some such wild idea. I had grown morbid by being alone all day and brooding over a resemblance which I have not been able to prevent affecting me disagreeably at intervals. This resemblance does not exist for you, and you have not been subtile enough to put yourself in my place. However, all that is past; it shall not disturb me in future. When I invited the Denhams to this dinner it was solely that I might present you to the woman I shall marry if she will have me."
"She is too good for you, Ned."
"I know it. That's one thing makes me love her. I admire superior people; it is my single merit. I wouldn't stoop to marry my equal. Flemming, what possessed you to question her about New Hampshire?"
"We were speaking of the White Hills, and the question asked itself. I wasn't thinking of your puerilities; don't imagine it. I hope her reply settled you. What are you going to do now?"
"I shall go with them to Chamouni."
"And afterwards?"
"My plan is to wait there until the uncle comes."
"That would be an excellent plan if you wanted to marry the uncle. If I were you, Ned, I would go and speak with Miss Denham, and then with the aunt, who will be worth a dozen uncles if you enlist her on your side. She doesn't seem unfriendly to you."
"I will do that, Flemming," returned Lynde thoughtfully. "I am not sure that Miss Denham would marry me. We are disposing of her as if she could be had for the asking. I might lose everything by being premature."
"Premature! I've a mind to stay over and fall in love with her myself. I could do it in a day and a half, and you have been six weeks about it."
"Six weeks! I sometimes think I have loved her all my life," said Lynde.
From the Schweizerhof the young men drove without speaking to the railroad station, which they reached just in time for Flemming to catch his train. With hurriedly exchanged promises to write each other, the two parted on the platform. Then Lynde in a serenely happy frame of mind caused himself to be driven to the Rue des Paquis, where he stopped at the chateau of the French marquis, which looked remarkably like a livery-stable, and arranged for a certain travelling-carriage to be at the door of the hotel the next morning at eight.