At the close of his first senatorial term, Mark Sutherland had been set up as the candidate of the liberal party for one of the highest offices in the gift of the people. Political business, about this time, called Mr. Sutherland to New York. He was received with enthusiasm by the friends of his party, and when his business was dispatched, he entered freely into the fashionable society of the city.
India had seen his arrival announced with the usual flourish of the press trumpets. And every day she saw his honours and his triumphs chronicled in the morning and evening papers. She could not bear the thought of meeting him in her poverty now. But in that extensive wilderness of crowded buildings, called New York, she believed herself as completely screened from observation and discovery as though she had been away in London or in Paris, or in a desert or a forest. And she also felt assured that he had not the slightest clue to her dwelling place.
But it happened that, during his sojourn in New York, Mr. Sutherland had consented, with feelings partly of amusement and partly of annoyance, to sit for his portrait, to adorn some lyceum or lecture room. And the painting had been finished and hung up, and had attracted crowds of his friends and admirers—for a few days—and then had been left “alone in its glory.”
One morning, at an hour so early that it was highly improbable he should find any other visitors there, Mr. Sutherland went to the lyceum to procure a rare volume on jurisprudence. The librarian was in his stall, but otherwise the room seemed deserted.
Perhaps Mr. Sutherland’s foot was light in stepping—perhaps the carpet was thick and soft, or it might be that the lady he presently saw standing before his portrait was so abstracted that she could not hear the entrance of another visitor. At all events, she did not perceive his approach, and Mr. Sutherland went past, selected his volume, and had turned to go back, when a casual glance at the lady, and a flutter of her brown veil, disclosed to his astonished eyes the face of India.
He could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy. His first impulse was to spring forward and greet her. Had he been some years younger, he would have done so on the spur of the moment; but age brings caution and teaches self-restraint; and it was well he refrained, for a second glance at that pale, impassioned face, with those dark, burning eyes, fixed with such a fascinated gaze upon the picture before her, warned him that by no rude shock must that colourless, motionless woman be approached.
Softly and silently he drew away towards the other extremity of the long room, where the librarian sat in his stall.
“Mr. Ferguson, do you know the lady at the other end of the room?” he inquired of that gentleman.
“No, I do not,” answered the librarian, after taking a look at India.
“Nor where she lives, of course?”