“Good-night.”
His hand was hot and trembling as it clasped Mrs. Lehmyl’s; a state of things which she, however, did not appear to notice. She gazed calmly into his eyes, and returned a quiet good-night. He stood a long while in the doorway of his house, looking across at No. 46. He saw the light quenched in the parlor, and other lights break out in the floors above. Then these in their turn were extinguished; and he knew that the occupants were on their way to the land of Nod. “Good angels guard her slumbers,” he said, half aloud, and climbed the stairs that led to his own bedchamber. There he lay awake hour after hour. He could hear the waters of the river lapping the shore, and discern the street lamps gleaming like stars along the opposite embankment. Now and again a tug-boat puffed importantly up stream—a steam whistle shrieked—a schooner glided mysteriously past. I don’t know how many times he confessed to his pillow, “I love her—I love her—I love her!”
The next day—Saturday—he passed in a fever of impatience. It seemed as though to-morrow never would arrive. At night he scarcely slept two hours. And on Sunday morning he was up by six o’clock. Then, how the hours and minutes did prolong themselves, until the hands of his watch marked three!
“What’s the matter with you?” Hetzel asked more than once. “Why are you so restless? You roam around like a cat who has lost her kittens. Any thing worrying you? Feeling unwell? Or what?”
“Oh, I’m a little nervous—guess I drank more coffee for breakfast than was good for me,” he replied.
He tried to read. The print blurred before his eyes. He tried to write a letter. He proceeded famously thus far: “New York, May 24, 1884.—My dearest mother.—” But at this point his pen stuck. Strive as he might, he could get no further.
He tore the paper up, in a pet. He smoked thrice his usual allowance of tobacco. Every other minute he had out his watch. He half believed that Time had slackened its pace for the especial purpose of adding fuel to the fires that were burning in his breast. Such is the preposterous egotism of a man in love.
When at length the clock struck half after two, his pulse quickened. This last half hour was as long as the entire forepart of the day had been. With each moment, his agitation increased. Finally he and Hetzel crossed the street. He had to bite his lips and press his finger-nails deep into the flesh of his hands, in order to command a tolerably self-possessed exterior.
Arthur says that he remembers the rest of that Sunday as one remembers a bewildering dream. He remembers, to begin with, how Mrs. Lehmyl met him in Mrs. Hart’s drawing-room, and gave him a warm, soft hand, and spoke a few pleasant words of welcome. He remembers how his heart fluttered, and how he had to catch for breath, as he gazed into her unfathomable eyes, and inhaled that daintiest of perfumes which clung to her apparel. He remembers how he marched at her side through Fiftieth Street to Madison Avenue, in a state of delirious intoxication, and how they mounted a celestial chariot—Hetzel says it was a Madison Avenue horse car—in which he sat next to her, and heard her voice mingle with the tinkling of silver bells, like a strain of heavenly music. He remembers how they sauntered through the galleries, chatting together about—oddly enough, he can not remember what. Oddly enough, also, he can not remember the pictures that they looked at. He can remember only “the angelic radiance of her face and the wonderful witchery of her presence.” Then he remembers how they walked home together through the Park, green and fragrant in the gentle May weather, and took places side by side at the table on the roof. “What is strangest,” he says, “is this, that I do not remember any thing at all about the other people who were present—Hetzel and Mrs. Berle and Mrs. Hart. As I look back, it seems as though she and I had been alone with each other the whole time.” “But we were there, nevertheless,” Hetzel assures me; “and one of us enjoyed hugely witnessing his young friend’s infatuation. It was delightful to see the big, stalwart, imperious Arthur Ripley, helpless as a baby in the power of that little woman. One not well acquainted with him might not have perceived his condition; but to me it was as plain as the nose on his face.”—“There was a full moon that evening,” Arthur continues, “and I wish you could have seen her eyes in the moonlight. I kept thinking of the old song,
’In thy dark eyes splendor,