'I should think, Mr. Audouin,' Hiram answered slowly, with even more than his usual self-restraint, 'she must be a tolerably favourable specimen of European women.'
Audouin said no more; and Hiram, too, avoided the subject in future. Somehow, for the first time in his life, he felt just a little bit aggrieved and jealous of Audouin. It was he, Hiram, who had painted the picture which first caught Gwen's fancy—he called her 'Gwen' in his own mind, quite simply, having no other name by which to call her. It was he who was the artist and the selector of that particular point of view; and yet Audouin, all unconsciously as it seemed, had stepped in and appropriated to himself, by implication, the artistic honours of the situation. Audouin had talked his vague poetical nature-worship talk—it seemed to Hiram a trifle affected somehow, to-day; and had monopolised all Gwen's interest in the interview, and had left him, Hiram (the founder of the feast, so to speak), out in the cold, while he himself basked in the full sunshine of Gwen's momentary favour. And yet to Audouin what was she, after all, but a pretty passing stranger? while to him she was a revelation, a new birth, a latter-day Aphrodite, rising unbidden with her rosy cheeks from the very bosom of the smiling lake. And now she was going back again at once to Europe, that great, unknown, omnipotential Europe; and perhaps Hiram Winthrop would never again see the one woman who had struck him at first sight with the instantaneous thrill which the man who has once experienced it can never forget. Colin Churchill hadn't once yet even asked himself whether or not he was in love with Minna; but Hiram Winthrop acknowledged frankly forthwith to his own heart that he was certainly and undeniably in love with Gwen.
Who was she? that was the question. He didn't even know her surname: his sole information about her amounted exactly to this, that she was called Gwen, and that her father had been quartered at Chester. Hiram smiled to himself as he recollected the old legend of how St. Thomas à Becket's mother, a Saracen maiden, had come to England from the East, in search of her Christian lover, knowing only the two proper names, Gilbert and London. Was he, Hiram Winthrop, in this steam-ridden nineteenth century, in like manner to return to the old home of his forefathers, and make inquiry with all diligence for Gwen, Chester? The notion was of course too palpably absurd (though Audouin would have been charmed with it). Yet there can be no denying that from the moment Hiram met that beautiful English girl by the Lake of the Thousand Islands, his desire to see Europe was quickened by yet one more unacknowledged, but very powerful private attraction. If anybody had talked to him about marrying Gwen, he would have honestly laughed at the improbable notion, but in the indefinite way that young men often feel, he felt as though some vague influence drew him on towards Gwen, not as a woman to be wooed and won, but as a central object of worship and admiration.
At the hotel, they didn't know the name of the English gentleman and his daughter; the clerk said they only came for a day and expected no letters. Another guest had asked about them, too, he mentioned casually; but Hiram, accustomed to looking upon his friend as so much older than himself as to have outgrown the folly of admiring female beauty, never dreamt of supposing that that other guest was Lothrop Audouin. He searched the 'Herald,' indeed, a week later, to see if any English officer and his daughter had sailed from New York on the Friday, but there were no passengers whom he could at all identify with Gwen and her father. It didn't occur to him that they might have sailed, as they did sail, by the Canadian mail steamer from Quebec, where he couldn't have failed to discover them in the list of passengers; so he was left in the end with no other memorial of this little episode save the sketch of that sunny face, and the two names, Gwen and Chester. To those little memorials Hiram's mind turned back oftener than less solitary people could easily imagine during the next long twelve months of dreary advertisement-drawing at long, white, dusty, sun-smitten Syracuse.
CHAPTER XIV. MINNA GIVES NOTICE.
Colin,' Minna Wroe said to the young workman one evening, as they walked together through the streets of London towards the Regent's Park: 'do you know what I've actually gone and done to-day? I've give notice.'
'Given notice, Minna! What for, on earth? Why, you seemed to me so happy and comfortable there. I've never seen you in any other place where you and your people seemed to pull so well together, like.'
'Ah, that's just what she said to me, Colin.' (She in this connection may be familiarly recognised as a pronoun enclosing its own antecedent.) 'She said she couldn't imagine what my reason could be for leaving; and so I just up and told her. And as it isn't any use keeping it from you any longer, I think I may as well up and tell you too, Colin. Colin, I don't mean any more to be a servant.'