Harry made no response, but, taking a pretty rosebud from his buttonhole, he presented it to Mabel, saying: “We may never meet again, but Miss Gibbon and I will often speak of you when we are far away.”
Closely during this brief conversation had Harry’s father watched Mabel, and now he took her hand and pressed it, and the girl wondered why he gazed upon her with moistened eyes. Then, after showing her the ticket-office, Mr. Fletcher went to a flower-stand near by and bought her a beautiful bouquet which quite threw into the shade Harry’s rosebud. “Oh! thanks, sir,” said Mabel, as she accepted the flowers. “How delicious they are!”
When presently they parted Harry said to his father: “Miss Willey is a very fine girl, isn’t she? And I’ll not let Kitty call her a peasant any more.”
Mr. Fletcher did not seem to hear this remark; he appeared like one absorbed in a reverie. But of a sudden he burst out: “A peasant! a peasant! By heaven! there is not a princess in Europe better than Mabel Willey.”
“Well, Kitty would not call her a peasant except for her mother,” continued Harry. “But Mrs. Gibbon has filled her head with foolish notions.”
“Such as living in Europe,” answered Mr. Fletcher. Then, with a sigh, he added, “O Harry! how you have disappointed me. Why, I would rather see you wed a girl like Mabel, even if she were poor, than have you pass your days in a foreign land.”
“Would you really?” exclaimed Harry.
“But, alas!” went on Mr. Fletcher, now speaking to himself—“alas! ’twas I who urged him to make a rich match. Yet I have been rolling up money for years and years; and now, when I am worth a million, my only child is going to spend my fortune among foreigners.”
As they pursued their way to Wall Street, Harry noticed the unhappy look on his father’s face and again advised him to take a holiday. But Mr. Fletcher answered: “I wish I could. But I have been so long in the treadmill of business that now I should not know how to play if I went away.”
And so the millionaire went down to his office, while the heir to all his wealth, with a fresh rosebud sticking in his buttonhole, repaired to Delmonico’s to kill time, as he expressed it—to kill time sipping sherry and thinking about Paris and Kitty Gibbon.