"He certainly takes his time now in coming down," thought the visitor. There was, however, a movement in the passage, and Mrs. Martindale darted out. She came back immediately, looking somewhat embarrassed.
"I am sorry," she faltered, "but I find I am mistaken. He is not in."
"I am afraid you are not exerting enough influence, Mrs. Martindale," said Buckingham pleasantly, but somewhat perplexed in his mind at the length of time it had taken to make this discovery, and at the hallucination which had seemed to possess his cousin's mind when she announced him as about to appear. As for Miss Vila, she persistently refused to look up. She scarcely looked up, indeed, when Mr. Buckingham bowed himself out, though he looked eagerly at her, in hopes once more of catching the full light of her eyes.
She did look up, however, when the door closed behind the visitor, and she looked straight at Mrs. Martindale. That lady answered her look with one tear and a good many words:
"Well, Lillie, if you knew how I felt at getting into such a scrape, you wouldn't look at me as if you were an Avenging Conscience, or a Nemesis, or any of those horrid furies. No; and you wouldn't look speechlessly sorrowful, either. Of course I ought to have told him at once that Henry did not live here, and I ought to have sent him next door instead of sending Kate, and I ought not to have pretended that he was coming the next moment; but of course I thought he was at home, and then when he came I could have laughed it off; but he didn't come, and I was too frightened to laugh it off. Oh, yes, I am a criminal of the deepest dye; but he's introduced, Lillie, and you've introduced him to me, and we're all—we're all introduced."
X.
THE REAL HERO.
When a pile of wood has been laid upon smouldering embers, a thin curl of smoke crawls lazily up the chimney, another follows with like indolence, and it looks after a while as if the wood would not burn at all. Suddenly a little whiff of air enters the pile, when, presto! up blazes the fire, and soon there is a famous glow.
It was somewhat thus with Mr. Austin Buckingham. He had been toying with the fancy of his story, and especially of this maiden to whom his eyes had become so wonted, and had allowed himself to look at her in so many lights, that she had gradually come to be always before him. The figure of the hero had as gradually disappeared: it was only by an effort that he could revive it. Suddenly he had sat a long quarter of an hour with the girl, he had heard her voice, he had seen her smile, he had felt the graciousness of her near presence when he was not merely at hand, but the direct object of her thought. What a world of difference there was between sitting by her side in a crowded horse-car and sitting even half a room-breadth's away, when they two were the only ones in the room!
By all this experience, as much perhaps by what had gone before as by what had followed suddenly after, Buckingham now stood revealed to himself. He was ablaze with this new, tingling, searching ardor. When he had entered the room and shut the door, he saw lying upon his table his note-book, open as he had left it. He had been amusing himself, just before he went out, with further suggestions for his story. He dipped his pen into the ink and drew a bold, straight line across the page. He stood looking at the leaf,—idle fancy above the line, a blank below it.