Mr. Sylvestre bestowed a critical glance upon him.
"What's the matter with you?" he inquired, languidly. "There's something radically wrong about a man who neglects his opportunities in that way." He paused and smiled, showing his white teeth through his mustache. "Oh, she's a clever little dev"—He pulled himself up with remarkable adroitness. "She's very clever," he said. "She's delightfully clever."
"She must be," commented Tredennis, unenthusiastically. "I never hear her mentioned without its being added that she is very clever."
"You would be likely to find the thing out for yourself when you met her—even if you hadn't heard it," said Mr. Sylvestre.
When Tredennis returned to his room that night he sat down to read, deliberately choosing a complicated work which demanded the undivided attention of the peruser. He sat before it for half an hour, with bent brow and unyielding demeanor; but at the end of that time he pushed it aside, left his seat, and began to pace the floor, and so walked with a gloomy face until it was long past midnight when he put out the light and went to bed.
CHAPTER III.
Two years later he found himself, one evening in March, driving along Pennsylvania avenue in a musty hack, which might have been the very one which had borne him to the depot the night he had seen the last of Bertha and her white roses. But the streets were gayer now than they had been then. He had arrived only a day or so after the occurrence of an event of no less national importance than the inauguration of a newly elected President, and there still remained traces of the festivities attendant upon this ceremony, in the shape of unremoved decorations fluttering from windows, draping doors, and swaying in lines across the streets. Groups of people, wearing a rather fatigued air of having remained after the feast for the purpose of more extended sight-seeing, gave the sidewalks a well-filled look, and here and there among them was to be seen a belated uniform which had figured effectively in the procession to the Capitol two days before.
Having taken note of these things, Tredennis leaned back upon his musty cushions with a half sigh of weariness.