Faraday arose, too bitterly annoyed for speech. Genevieve, rising too, and touching her skirts with arranging hand, continued, apparently unconscious of the storm she was rousing:
"And yet it seems odd that you should find such a difference. Lord Hastings, now, who's English, and much more conventional, thinks the people here just as refined and particular as any other Americans."
"It's evident," said Faraday, in a voice roughened with anger, "that Lord Hastings's appreciation of the refinement of the Americans is only equaled by your admiration for the talents of the English."
"I do like them," said Genevieve, dubiously, shaking her head, as if she was admitting a not entirely creditable taste, and looking away from him.
There was a moment's silence. Faraday fastened his eyes upon her in a look of passionate confession that in its powerful pleading drew her own back to his.
"You're as honest as you are cruel," he said, almost in a whisper.
She made no reply, but turned her head sharply away, as if in sudden embarrassment. Then, in answer to his conventionally murmured good-byes, she looked back, and he saw her face radiant, alight, with the most beautiful smile trembling on the lips. The splendor of this look seemed to him a mute expression of her happiness—of love reciprocated, ambition realized—and in it he read his own doom. He turned blindly round to pick up his hat; the door behind him was opened, and there, handsome, debonair, fresh as a May morning, stood Lord Hastings, hat in hand.
"I hope you're not vexed, Miss. Ryan," said this young man, "but I'm very much afraid I'm just a bit late."
After this Faraday thought it quite unnecessary to visit Barney Ryan's "palatial mansion" for some time. Genevieve's engagement would soon be announced, and then he would have to go and offer his congratulations. As to whether he would dance at her wedding with a light heart—that was another matter. He assured himself that she was making a splendid and eminently suitable marriage. With her beauty and money and true simple heart she would deck the fine position which the Englishman could give her. He wished her every happiness, but that he should stand by and watch the progress of the courtship seemed to him an unnecessary twisting of the knife in the wound. Even the endurance of New England human nature has its limits, and Faraday could stand no more. So he refused an invitation to a tea from Mrs. Ryan, and one to a dinner and another to a small musical from Miss. Ryan, and alone in his Pine Street lodgings, for the first time in his life, read the "social columns" with a throbbing heart.
One Saturday afternoon, two weeks from the day that he had last seen Genevieve, he sat in his room trying to read. He had left the office early, and though it was still some hours before dark, a heavy unremitting rain had enveloped the afternoon in a premature twilight. The perpetual run of water from a break in the gutter near his window sounded drearily through the depressing history of the woes and disappointments of David Grieve. The gloom of the book and the afternoon was settling upon Faraday with the creeping stealthiness of a chill, when a knock sounded upon his door, and one of the servants without acquainted him with the surprising piece of intelligence that a lady was waiting to see him in the sitting-room below.