A Changed Heart: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

Miss Henderson dropped a bright silver shilling into the dirty palm of one, and asked him to hold the ponies for ten minutes; and the two girls walked along the decaying and deserted old wharf together.

"My solemn Laura!" the heiress said, looking at her friend's grave face; "what a doleful countenance you wear! Of what are you thinking?"

"I am thinking of poor Nathalie Marsh," Laura answered; "it was on this very wharf she met her death, that wild, windy night. I have never been near the place since."

It is a remarkable trait of these swarthy faces that emotion does not pale them as it does their blonde neighbors—they darken. Miss Henderson's face darkened now—it always seemed to do so when the name of the dead girl was mentioned. She turned away from her friend, and stood staring moodily out to sea, until an exclamation from that young lady caused her to turn round and perceive that either the sea-wind or some other cause had very perceptibly heightened Miss Blair's color.

"I declare if that's not Val," Laura cried, "and that strange gentleman with him that came from New York the other day. There! they see us, and are coming here."

Miss Henderson looked indifferently as Mr. Blake and his friend approached. Val introduced his companion to the ladies as Mr. Paul Wyndham, of New York, and that gentleman was received graciously by Miss Blair, and coldly, not to say haughtily, by Miss Henderson.

The heiress did not like people from New York. She never talked about that city, if she could help it, and rather avoided all persons coming from it. She stood, looking vacantly out at the wide sea, and listening to the sailors' song, taking very little part in the conversation. She turned round, when the singing ceased, in the direction of her carriage, with a listless yawn she was at little trouble to suppress, and a bored look she took no pains to conceal. The gentlemen saw them safely off, and then loitered back to the old wharf.

"Well, Wyndham," Val asked, "and what do you think of the Princess of Speckport?"

Mr. Paul Wyndham did not immediately reply. He was leaning lazily against a rotten beam, lighting a cigar, for he was an inveterate smoker.

Mr. Wyndham was not handsome, he was not dashing—he had neither mustache nor whisker, nor an aquiline nose; and he could not dance or sing, or do anything else like any other young Christian gentleman. He was very slight and boyish of figure, with a pale, student-like face, a high forehead, deep-set eyes, a characteristic nose, and a thin and somewhat cynical mouth. There was character in everything about him, even in the mathematical precision of his dress, faultlessly neat in the smallest particular, and scrupulously simple. He looked like a gentleman and a student, and he was both. More, he was an author, a Bohemian, with a well-earned literary fame, at the age of seven-and-twenty. When he was a lad of seventeen he had started with his "knapsack on his back," containing a clean shirt, and a quire of foolscap, and had traveled through Europe and Asia, and had written two charming books of travel, that filled his pockets with dollars, and established his fame as an author. Since then he had written some half-dozen delightful novels, over which Laura Blair herself had cried and laughed alternately, although she did not know now that Mr. Wyndham and —— —— were one and the same. He had written plays that had run fifty nights at a time, and his sketches were the chief charm of one or two of the best American magazines. He was a poet, an author, a dramatist, sometimes an actor, when he took the notion, and a successful man in all. He looked as those inspired men who chain us with their wonderful word-painting should look, albeit I reiterate he was not handsome. He stood now leaning against the rotten beam, smoking his cigar, and looking dreamily over the shining sea, while Mr. Blake repeated his question.