"I'll give you one thought that has occurred to me and then leave you to solve the problem for yourself. Have you ever seen a person who had been delirious or deranged become sand and quiet, simple and natural? Although Miss Mayhew's expression and manner are so different from what we have seen hitherto, she looks and acts to-night just as one instinctively feels she ought always to appear in order to be her true self. Before there was discord; now there is harmony."
"If I had your eyes I'd never read books. You suggest the effect perfectly, but what is the cause?"
"Was a man ever satisfied?"
"One certainly never is where you are concerned, but will always echo Oliver Twist's plaintive appeal for 'more.'"
"O constant moon! register that vow," said Miss Burton, laughing. "Mr. Van Berg, one of the first rules that I teach my young ladies is to say good-evening to a gentleman when he grows sentimental," and she smiling vanished through a window that opened on the piazza.
"Jennie Burton," he muttered, "you are a wraith, an exquisite ghost that will haunt me all my days, but on which I can never lay my hands."
The next morning the artist, in his kindling interest, was guilty of a stratagem. He took an early breakfast by himself, under the pretence that he was going on a sketching expedition; but he went straight to the brow of a little hill that overlooked the road which Ida must take should she visit her new-found friends again. He soon became very busy with his sketch-book, but instead of outlines of the landscape before him taking shape on the paper, you might have seen the form of a young girl on a stairway with her head bowed on her right arm that rested on the baluster rail, which she timidly held out her left hand in the pace of words she could not speak.
It was with a foreboding sigh that Ida realized how much she missed him at breakfast.
Before the meal was over a letter was handed to Mrs. Mayhew. It contained only these words from her husband: "In memory of my last visit I conclude it will be mutually agreeable to us all that I spend Sunday elsewhere. You need not dread my coming."
She handed the letter to her daughter with a frown and the remark:
"It's just like him."