"But that Paris case," pleaded Bedford. "Do tell us about that."
"Did you use the Hindoo method of respiration that the Swami Bramachunenda gave an exposition of here two or three years ago?" asked another of the fraternity, and the others followed with different interrogatives, but Earl laughed and waved them all away.
"I don't know what the Swami did," he said, "but if he is like some of his brothers I'm ready to believe anything. All that I did, and a great deal that I never thought of doing myself, or heard of anybody else doing on this planet, was told in your papers at the time. Really, if I had anything worth your while as a news story I would be glad to give it to you—one of these days I may have, but you must excuse me now."
His manner was courteous but unmistakable, and turning away from them he was soon absorbed in conversation with the pretty girl and his brother and sister. He hardly took his eyes off the former as he recounted his adventures abroad.
Three months previously he and Leonora Kimball had been betrothed in Vienna, and it was agreed that they were to be married soon after his arrival home. In a social way, the match met the approval of New York's select set, for they belonged to equally wealthy and prominent families. The Earls had come to New York from New England, two generations ago, and the foundation of the family fortune had been laid in a small block of New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, which had grown into a huge block of both stocks and bonds from the various expansions of stock and consolidations of property that had meanwhile taken place. The Kimballs had come from the Pacific coast, where the same alchemist's result had been wrought with a block of Southern Pacific Railway stock. The family tree of the Earls had rooted itself into the subsoil of real culture, while that of the Kimballs was mostly displayed above ground with only here and there a stray fibre that had sunk to any depth.
Leonora Kimball, who at this time was slightly over twenty-three years of age, possessed a most winning and gracious manner—a face that might have served as a better model for a madonna than many of those apparently used by the old masters; a lithe and graceful figure and an abundance of vivacity when doing the things that pleased her. She had so captivated John Earl from their first meeting that he had never tried nor cared to analyze her. Indeed, had he so wished, he would have found it a difficult undertaking, for he was too content with the pleasure he felt in her presence to care to question it.
Dr. Earl had taken infinite pains to search the world for the sources of disease and its prevention and cure. He had delved deeply into the mysteries of mental and spiritual therapeutics, and had closely studied the influences surrounding the origin of individual human beings. But while he had harnessed many more or less occult forces into scientific service in treating invalids, strangely enough, it never occurred to him that similar elements might have an important mission in determining the natural affinity of those attracted by the tenderest passion in the world, and might do much, if properly regarded, to render stable that one-time sacred bond of the sexes known as the marriage relation, which at this time, everywhere, was resting upon such shifting quicksands of mismating as to menace its existence.
"Love is of man's life a thing apart," applied with full force to Dr. Earl, and he accepted his relations with Leonora Kimball with the same confidence and light heart that might characterize the least thoughtful man on Manhattan Island. While he had traveled many thousands of miles and burned many a midnight lamp to ascertain if improvement could not be made in the prevailing orthodox method of treating disease, he blindly accepted, as millions of strong men before him had done, the prevailing orthodox method of selecting a wife.
In any event, after the brother and sister had been left at the Ramsey mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, he and Leonora proceeded to spend the time from eleven to three o'clock very much as other lovers similarly situated would have consumed those four hours. They motored until one o'clock, when they went to her house, not far from his sister's residence, where he had luncheon with her and her widowed mother, and at three o'clock he arrived at the Hotel Gotham, where he had engaged apartments.
When he stepped into his new sitting-room a large photograph of Leonora confronted him on the dressing-case, his valet being a man of rare sense and tact.