He had intended to make this selfsame slipper the excuse for following up what he was convinced was the romance of his life; but Marian Seymour had already returned home to New York when he called three days later. This was a disappointment, still at that moment it seemed but a postponement after all, for he was sailing for Europe a fortnight hence and could easily reach New York a day or two earlier than he had planned. Thus far the idea was capital; but when the second call was paid, with the pink slipper safely reposing in his pocket, he found that the dainty foot to which the slipper belonged had stepped upon an ocean steamer which sailed the day before.
Even this second misadventure failed to dampen his ardor. Good fortune had arranged for him to follow in her direction, and surely, when once upon the same continent, the slipper would be a lodestone of sufficient potency to draw together two souls such as theirs. Yet he returned six months later without having had the expected happen, and soon after landing he learned of her engagement to a Mr. Thatcher.
There is a certain gratification which comes to the experienced man of the world of twenty-two when he finds himself a martyr; and Monty Huntington enjoyed this gratification to the utmost. He was conscientious in believing himself to be wretchedly unhappy, but as a matter of fact he had in the instant become a hero to himself. Women were faithless: misogamists in prose and poetry had so chronicled the fact, and he had already, at this early age, become the victim of their perfidy. Marian Seymour should have known the depth of his love for her; she should have known that he would have told her of his affection had she given him the opportunity; and the mere fact that he had never so declared himself was not of the slightest importance. She had deliberately disregarded his impassioned though unexpressed sentiments toward her, and had thrown herself away on a man he did not even know!
Fortunately, Time treats with kindly hand those tragedies which are imagined as well as those which actually exist. Each year added to the luster of the memory. Marian Seymour herself would not have recognized her own face could Huntington have translated it out of the figments of his mind upon the crude medium of canvas. And, be it said, had Huntington come face to face with the original during these years, it is doubtful whether he would have recognized her; for the idealization had become absolutely real to him. No sculptor had ever modeled hand and arm so perfect as that which the yellowed glove had held; no foot was ever shaped with graceful line equal to that which once the satin slipper had incased. The faithlessness of woman had long since been forgotten, and the sanctity of this romance, which might have been, provided all the details which it would otherwise have lacked. Each year made it more real, until now there was no doubt about it. Other men worshiped at the shrine of departed dear ones with no greater sincerity than did Montgomery Huntington revere this near-romance of his life.
So, as he sat there, he was not the bachelor his friends considered him, but rather a man bereft of wife and children. Cosden, knowing nothing of this secret grief, had wantonly torn the veil aside and exposed the wound. Yet, with the sorrow of the widower and the childless, there must have come back to Huntington some memories which were not sad, for when Dixon happened upon him in the morning, soundly sleeping in his favorite chair with this curious exhibit before him, and with a pink slipper firmly grasped within his hand, there was a smile as if of happiness upon his face. And Dixon, discreet valet that he was, showed no surprise, a half-hour later, when he found the table and its strange contents carefully put away without his aid, or when his master summoned him to his room, where he appeared to be just rising as usual from a sleep as restful as it had been unportentous.
III
"Then I shall leave Bermuda feeling that my beautiful dream is wholly incomplete."
Mrs. Henry Thatcher spoke with a degree of resignation, but her tone signified that the apparent retreat was only to gain strength for a final advance which was sure to gain her point. She knew that this discussion with her husband would end as all their differences of opinion ended, and so did he. Perhaps his opposition was the inevitable expression of his own individuality which every married man likes to make a pretense of preserving; perhaps it pleased him to see his wife's half-playful, half-serious attack upon his own judgment in gently forcing him into a position where her wishes became his desires.