"Some other time," replied Brassfield, "I shall be delighted. But Miss Waldron has just been driven out into the street, and if she comes this way, I must exhibit myself to her, and maybe she'll pick me up. She's turning this way—— Billy, eh? Happy Billy; nice boy, too, since he stopped drinking. By-by, Daisy-daise!"
Elizabeth came driving down the road, and walking up it came Aaron, sable messenger of the anxious Madame le Claire, who had enlisted Aaron in her service to bring Brassfield again within her magic realm. He reached the object of his search before the carriage passed, and delivered a note.
"Tell Madame le Claire," said Brassfield, whose ideas with reference to that person must have been very hazy, "that such an invitation is a command. I'll be with her immediately."
He stood smiling, hat in hand, at the crossing, as Elizabeth drove by. She halted, and looked questioningly at him. This smile, this confident aspect—all these were so different from his recent bearing that she was surprised, and not more than half pleased. The element of assurance in his attitude toward the other girl was not seen in his treatment of Elizabeth, to whom it would have been offensive. Perhaps the cunning of the consciously abnormal intellect was the cause of this; or it may have been some emanation of dignity from the woman herself acting on a mind in a state chronically hypnotic. Be the cause what it may, to Elizabeth, with all his confidence and ardor, he was most deferential and correct in manners, and, to her, these manners had undergone no change. Confidently, as if no shadow had ever come over their relations, he put his foot upon the step of the carriage.
"Won't you give me a lift," said he, "and put me down at my home?"
She made room for him with scarcely more than a word. "To the Bellevale House," said she to the coachman.
Brassfield looked at her, so grave, so distinguée, so coolly sweet, and forgot apparently that there was any one else in the world. He slipped his hand under the lap-robe, and gave hers a gentle pressure.
"Dearest!" he half-whispered, caring very little whether he was overheard or not.
She returned the caress by the slightest possible compression, and put her hand outside the robe. Whether the one action was incited by a desire to avoid complete unresponsiveness, and from a sense of duty only, the other left undecided.
The circumscribed mind of Brassfield which, with the intensity of observation rendered necessary and inevitable by its narrow field, had noted, as he stepped out in the street, the intangible shifting of relations in his surroundings incident to the mere passage of time in the few days of his obliteration, now felt, as a blind man feels the mountain in his approach, or as the steersman in a Newfoundland fog apprehends the nearing of the iceberg, some subtle alteration in the attitude toward him of the young woman by his side. Instantly he was on guard and keenly alert.