"This Madame Arles, Adèle,—has she been long in the country?"
"I don't know, papa; yet it must be some years; she speaks English passably well."
"And she has told you, I suppose, very much about the people among whom you were born, Adèle?"
"Not much, papa,—and never anything about herself or her history; yet I have been so curious!"
"Don't be too curious, petite; you might learn only of badness."
"Not badness, I am very, very sure, papa!"
Adèle is sitting on the arm of his chair, fondling those sparse locks of his, sprinkled with gray. It is a wholly new sensation for him; charming, doubtless; but even under the caresses of this daughter, of whom he has reason to be proud, anxious thoughts crowd upon him. Are not our deepest loves measured, after all, by the depth of the accompanying solicitude?
The Doctor is met very warmly by Maverick, and feels something like a revival of the glow of his youthful days as he takes his hand; and yet they are wider apart by far than when they met in the life-time of Rachel. Both feel it; they have travelled widely divergent roads, these last twenty years. The Doctor is satisfied by the bearing and talk of Maverick (whatever kindness may lie in it) that his worldliness is more engrossing and decided than ever. And Maverick, on his part, scrutinizing, carelessly, but unerringly, that embarrassed country manner of the parson's, that stark linen in which he is arrayed by the foresight of the spinster sister, and the constraint of his speech, is sure that his old friend more than ever bounds his thought by the duties of his sacred office.
The Doctor is, moreover, sadly out of place in that little parlor of the hotel, looking out upon Broadway; there is no adaptiveness in his nature; he comes out from the little world of his study, where Tillotson and Poole and Newton have been his companions, athwart the roar of the city street which sounds in his ear like an echo of the murmurs of Pandemonium. Under these circumstances he scarce dares to expostulate so boldly as he would wish with Maverick upon the worldliness of his career; it would seem like bearding the lion in his own den. Nor, indeed, does Maverick provoke such expostulation; he is so considerate of the Doctor's feelings, so grateful for his attentions to Adèle, so religiously disposed (it must be said) in all that concerns the daughter's education and future, and waives the Doctor's personal advices with so kind and easy a grace, that the poor parson despairs of reaching him with the point of the sword of Divine truth.
"My good friend," says Maverick, "you have been a father to my child,—a better one than I have made,—I wish I could repay you."