“You bought it yourself, Mr. Vincent.”
“Hush!” he softly whispers, with his finger on his lips. “We are fellow-conspirators, and cannot betray each other.”
Next year, when a great American city gave Edgar McDowald the order for a State monument, the beauty of his designs having distanced all competitors, Parisians remarked that Mrs. Montgomery’s discrimination, as regarded celebrities, seemed to have fallen upon her niece.
Mr. and Mrs. McDowald delight in telling of their romantic courtship, and how Miss Cameron’s scheme of an art sale brought about their marriage; but Miss Cameron always affirms that its success was not due to her, but to Mr. Vincent’s tact in exhibiting that expensive canvas to his friend.
Miss Cameron, being a worldly-wise young woman, tries to feel that Mr. Vincent’s motives were wholly generous and disinterested; but if what rumour says is true, Mr. Vincent would do more than that for the charming central figure in Mrs. McDowald’s Salon picture, which now looks down from a good position in the library of his own English home, and which never hung “on the line” after all.
V.
A Complex Question.
There were a half-dozen or more good riders in Tangier that winter, but Bob Travers was the acknowledged leader. At every annual race-meeting he proved to his backers that their confidence in him was not misplaced, for, brave fellows as they were, none of them rode so hard, or cared to take the risks which Bob cheerfully ran.
Robert MacNeil Travers, familiarly known as “Bob,” was spending his second season in Africa. The first time he had run across from “Gib” to look up something in the way of horseflesh, and once there he had easily fallen in with a set of men whose society he enjoyed extremely. They were dashing fellows, several of them young English noblemen, who found the free, bold life they could lead in this lawless place too fascinating to leave. It was very agreeable in that delicious winter climate to dash off over the wild country on a surefooted Barb horse, or to join some caravan for a few weeks’ excursion in the interior, while in England everyone was freezing, or at least imbedded in fog.
They had their little glimpses of civilization—the Tangerines—for the few resident Europeans were very glad to entertain any interesting visitors from the outside world. Bob Travers was as much liked by the wives and sisters of his friends as any gallant, well-bred Englishman deserves to be, and every one was pleased when his engagement was announced to pretty Mabel Burke, the sister of Boardman Burke, the artist, whose Eastern scenes, painted under the clear skies of Morocco, have won for him the reputation of being one of the foremost exponents in the new “Impressionist School.”
The occasions were rare when Bob Travers was not included, whether it was for a boar hunt, a day with the fox hounds, or a little dance, at any one of the half-dozen hospitable European houses.