The old man had asked that he might himself convey to Downing the news of the honour bestowed on him, and he had done so in a letter full of honourable amend, of which one passage ran: 'As I grow older I have become aware of having done many things which I should have left undone; the principal of these, the one I have long most regretted, was my action concerning your case.'
Only one human being, and that a woman whose sympathy was none the less valued because she had scarcely understood all it had meant to her friend, was ever shown the letter which had so moved and softened him. But from the day he received it the thought of going home, back to England, never left him, and he would have accomplished his purpose long before, had it not been that the consequence of his second great mistake still pursued him.
II
Attracted by a prim modesty of demeanour and apparent lack of emotion, new to him in women of his own class, and doubtless feeling acutely the terrible loneliness and strangeness attendant on his new life in such a city as was the New York of that time, George Downing had married, within a year of his arrival in America, a girl of good Puritan-Dutch stock and considerable fortune. Prudence Merryquick—her very name had first attracted him—had offered him that agreeable emotional pastime, a platonic friendship. Soon the strange relationship between them piqued and irritated him, and, manlike, he longed to stir, if not to plumb, the seemingly untroubled depths of her still nature. At first she resisted with apparent ease, and this incited him to serious skilful pursuit. Poor Prudence had no chance against a man who, in despite and in a measure because of his youth, had often played a conquering part in the mimic love warfare of an older and more subtle civilization. She surrendered, not ungracefully, and for a while it seemed as if the ex-Foreign Office clerk was like to make a successful American banker.
Their honeymoon lasted a year; then an accident, or, rather, some exigencies of business, caused them to spend a winter in Washington. There Downing's story was of course known; indeed, the newly-appointed British Minister had been a friend of his father, and one of those who had tried ineffectually to save him. This renewal of old ties brought on a terrible nostalgia. To Prudence a longing for England was incomprehensible—England had cast her husband out—indeed, she desired, with a fierceness of feeling which surprised Downing, to see him become a naturalized American, but to this he steadily refused to consent.
As winter gave way to spring they moved even further apart from one another, and, as might have been expected, the first serious difference of opinion, too grave to call a quarrel, concerned their future home.
Downing, on the best terms with his partners, had arranged to return permanently to Washington. To his wife, a world composed of European diplomatists and cosmopolitan Americans was utterly odious and incomprehensible. She showed herself passionately intolerant of her husband's friends, especially of those who were his own countrymen and countrywomen, and she looked back with increasing longing to her early married life in New York, and to the days when George Downing had apparently desired no companionship but her own.
Both husband and wife were equally determined, equally convinced as to what was the right course to pursue, and no compromise seemed possible. But one day, quite early in the winter following that which had seen them first installed in Washington, Downing received an urgent recall to New York. With the easy philosophy which had been one of his early charms, he went unsuspectingly, but a few days after he and Prudence had once more settled down in the Dutch homestead inherited by her from Knickerbocker forebears, he came back rather sooner than had been his wont. Prudence met him at the door, for she had returned to this early habit of their married life.
'Tell me,' he said quietly and while in the act of putting down his hat, 'did you ask Mr. Fetter to arrange for my return here?'