THE CRIME OF

HENRY VANE

A STUDY WITH A MORAL

By J. S. of Dale

Author of “Guerndale”

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1884

Copyright, 1884,
By CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

Press of J. J. Little & Co.,
Nos. 10 to 20 Astor Place, New York.

THE
Crime of Henry Vane.

“——Make a fool of yourself, like Vane.”

“I am not so sure that is fair to Vane,” said John; “no one can go through what he did, and keep perfectly sound.”

“I’ll leave it to the crowd,” said the Major; “what say you, boys?”

All were unanimous. There was no excuse for a crime like Vane’s. Evidently they all knew Vane. He was damned without one dissenting voice.

“Who was Vane?” said I, “and what did he do? Which commandment did he break? He must have made merry with them all—or, rather, have kept them all to get such a judgment in this club.”

A babel of voices arose. All these men were intimate friends; and they were sitting in one of the small smoking-rooms of the Columbian Club in New York. John had just engaged himself to be married, and we had given him a dinner; or, as Pel Schuyler put it, we were “recording his mortgage.” Schuyler was a real-estate broker.

“Now, look here,” said John, “how many of you fellows know Vane personally?”

No one, apparently. There was a moment’s silence. Then the Major spoke up. “Bah!” said he, “I have heard the story these ten years.” “So have I!” chimed in several others. “My brother knew Vane in Paris,” said Pel. “I had it from Mrs. Malgam herself,” simpered Daisy Blake, fatuously.

“Well, at least, I know nothing of it,” I said; “tell it for my benefit, John.”

“Yes, yes,” cried they, “let’s hear the correct and only version according to John.”

It was that critical moment in a dinner, when the fireworks of champagne have sputtered out, and the burgundy invites to somnolence. All had lit their cigars, and felt more like listening than talking. John did not smoke.

“I will,” said he. “At that time, I was his best—I may say, his only friend.”

“And I say, still,” said the Major, “he acted like a fool and criminally. There can be no excuse for such conduct.”

John shrugged his shoulders and began. Of course, I do not mean that he told the whole story just as I have written it. He related the bare facts, with little comment and without conversations. Whether you condemned the man or excused him, John thought, his story might be understood, even if his folly were not forgiven. The crowd at the club did neither; and, perhaps, their judgment is the judgment of the world; and the world is probably right. But we may learn from folly; it is sometimes more suggestive than common sense. There is the ordinary success and there is the exceptional failure; that is pleasanter, but this is more instructive. Extreme cases fix the law.

The world is probably right; and, to those of us who are healthily adapted to our environment, the world is enough. Blessed are they who are fitted, for they shall survive. The world is enough; but the poet sang, love is enough. Shall we say, love is surplusage? The world is always right; and how virtuously the healthy world reproves what is morbid! How all the world unites in condemning him who is not fully content with itself! For such an one it cannot even spare its pity. There is a kind of personal animus in its contempt.

Let us hasten to join our little voices to swell the universal song. So John told the story—plainly and coldly, the more adversely for the lingering doubt; so we tell the story, and the doubt lessens as we state the facts, and quite vanishes as we reach the end. It is the story of a common crime, and the criminal is no friend of ours, as he was of John’s. Moreover, Schuyler called the criminal a fool.

I.

IN April, 1873, Henry Vane was sitting on the perron of a small summer house in Brittany, poking the pebbles in the driveway with his cane. He had been there for half an hour, and there was nothing in his appearance and attitude to indicate that he would not be there for half an hour more. There was one red pebble, in particular, which he had an especial desire to prod out from among the others, which were gray. But it was round and slippery, and slid about the ferruled end of his cane. After poking it some time, he desisted and held the cane in his hands in front of his knees, which, as the next step of the porch was not much lower, were as high as his chin. “C’en est fait de moi,” he muttered.

Henry Vane, though a New Yorker, had been brought up in France, and in the French language his thoughts came most readily. He had just seen, for the last time, an old friend of his—a girl, whom he had known in infancy, in childhood, in maidenhood; and whom it seemed incredible, impossible, intolerable, that he should know no more. It was upon the piazza of her uncle’s house that he was sitting; and she was to leave the next day for Switzerland.

He was of age that day, and was “his own man now.” “And hers,” he thought, bitterly. She did not love him, however; and, at his request, had just told him so.

“Décidément, c’en est fait de moi,” he muttered again, and gave the pebble a vicious dig, which sent it flying into an acacia bush that stood in a green tub by the side of the driveway.

He was twenty-one that day, and had come into his fortune. His fortune was not much—four thousand a year, left him by his grandmother and invested in government bonds. Still, twenty thousand francs made him distinctly a rentier; and twenty thousand francs seemed a good deal, shared with the girl he loved. But it seemed very little for him alone; genteel poverty in fact. He certainly could neither yacht nor race. Travelling—except en étudiant—was equally out of the question.

Vane was a flippant young fellow, with a French education; fond of the world, of which, as he then thought, he knew much. Yet the Figaro and the Bois de Boulogne and the Palais-Royal, or even the Français, did not seem to satisfy him, that day. And all for a little “Mees Anglaise!” How his friends would laugh at him! He was very young—they would say; very young for a grande passion. And then they would laugh again. But Vane felt sure that he should never get over it.

What the deuce did fellows do in his position? He felt a wild desire for adventure and excitement; but excitement and adventure were expensive; unless there happened to be a war, and you went officially. But he had not many illusions of romance in war. He knew men who had been at Woerth and Gravelotte. Then there was travel. But this, also, was expensive. Old Prunier, the Professor, had made an expedition through Soudan the year before, and it had cost him eight hundred thousand francs. Moreover, you had to be up on rocks and beetles and things, to make your trip of any use to the world. And Vane had not yet given up all idea of being of use in the world. Besides, even Prunier’s expedition had not ended in much, except a row with the Portuguese missionaries on the subject of the slave trade. These Christian slavers had met Prunier’s remonstrances with the plausible argument that it was better for the negroes to be slaves in a Christian country, and save their souls, than free on earth and damned when they died. Prunier had consequently reported a crying need for a better article of missionary in Central Africa. But Vane could not go as a missionary. He felt that his confidence in Providence, at that moment, was not hardy enough to bear transplanting into the native South African mind, through the medium of a Turanian dialect.

He might seek the land of his nativity, and make his four thousand a year, eight thousand. His father’s business, for the moment, lay in Bellefontaine. He did not in the least know where Bellefontaine was, but the name had a civilized sound. And she was going to Switzerland.

Vane must have clenched his hands at this point; for he felt a decided pricking in his left forefinger. And he observed several thorns on the stem of the rose she had given him. For she had given him a rose. That much favor had been shown him. He got into his mother’s little phaeton and drove home—with his rose. So far, his investments in life had not been successful. The account with fortune might read somewhat like this—Debtor, an English girl: to ten years’ love and an indefinite amount of devotion and sentiment. Creditor, by the English girl: one rose (with thorns). That is, if he had put the Dr. and Cr. sides right. He never could remember which was which. At all events, the returns on his investment were not large. And he, with his uncertainty about debtor and creditor, to think of competing with the practical Yankee of Bellefontaine! No; he would leave his four thousand a year where it was—a somewhat insignificant part of the national debt. Meantime, what would become of him? What should he do? He felt an idle outsider’s curiosity to know what the deuce he would do.

Of one thing he felt certain, his orbit in life would be highly eccentric. He had no raison d’être; and it is difficult to predict the direction taken by a body without raison d’être. The curve of such a comet has no equation. He could no longer view life with gravity; and it is quite impossible to calculate the orbit of a body without gravity. He might bring up anywhere from Orion to the Great Bear. Only one thing was certain—he could not, for the present, bring up in Switzerland; and yet, oddly enough, that seemed to be the only part of any possible terrestrial orbit that had an attraction. But attraction decreases as the square of the distance. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he was now two miles from her, and loved her with his whole heart; if he were twelve thousand miles away, he would love her only one divided by the square of six thousand—only one thirty-six-millionth part as much. In other words, he would have thirty-five million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine thirty-six millionths of his heart left—left to bestow upon the dusky beauties of the Pacific. Damn the dusky beauties of the Pacific. He would see his sister Mary. After all, she was dearer to him than the dusky beauties of the Pacific could possibly be.

When the boy arrived home, he drove to the stable, and alighting, threw the reins to a groom. He was perfectly sure that his life was broken; but a groom is a necessary adjunct of any life at all. He rolled a cigarette and strolled toward the house, still holding the rose, by the stem, between the first and second fingers of his left hand. Momentarily his thoughts had wandered from the English girl; he was still entirely busied in constructing a proper dénouement for himself. The romance of his life, he felt, was gone; but he desired that his career should be consistent with his tragic part in life. She had left him enough self-esteem for that.

So he entered the house.

II.

THE next few weeks seemed long enough to Vane; but, fortunately, we may make them short. They must be told; they were part of his life; how large a part, no one—possibly not even himself—ever knew.

When Vane entered the main door, which François, the old butler, did not open for him as usual, he saw nothing of his mother. One or two of her shawls were lying, as if hastily thrown off, on the carved oak chair in the hall. The day was cool, and the embers of the morning fire were still red in the chimneyplace. The cigarette did not satisfy him; so he pulled out a cigar, and looking for a lighter, noticed a yellow envelope near him, back downward on the floor; close by it was a thin sheet of paper. Taking this, he was about to twist it up, when he saw that it was a telegram. He opened it and read his name, and the message, “Mary is dead. Tell your mother for us. Pray, come directly. Gresham.”

When the servants came in, they found him standing by the fireplace. “Yes,” they said to him, “Madame had left for Dieppe that morning. She said nothing, but that Mr. Henry should follow her to England. François had accompanied her. Mr. Henry would have the carriage immediately. But surely Mr. Henry would dine before departing.”

No; he would go directly. Thomas must pack his portmanteau. “And, Thomas, lay out a black suit—all in black, you understand?” He would take a glass of wine and a biscuit. “And, Thomas, all letters for any one were to be forwarded to him at Sir Thomas Gresham’s, The Eyotts, Rushey, Lincolnshire. Stop; he would write the address on a card.“ So he caught the evening mail from Rennes, and the night tidal steamer from Dieppe. And the gray English fog at sunrise the next morning found him off Newhaven, still pacing the deck.

Into the cloud of London at nine; out at ten, and flying through Essex cornfields and Cambridgeshire fens. There had been heavy rains the night before, and the country was soggy and saturated, with white gleams of water over the land. The hay was swashing in the fields like seaweed. Then the great church of Ely broke the horizon, and he changed the train, finding an hour to wait. The little town was deserted; the great towers seemed to weigh it down, to compel a solemn stillness. He passed his time in the cathedral. At the end of the nave, just in front of the eastern windows, is a beautiful reredos, a marvellous assemblage of angels, saints and pinnacles. There is a central figure of Christ among the apostles which had a strange attraction for him. He must have been quite rapt in this; for the din of the noon-day bells reminded him that his train left at twelve-fourteen.

At Rushey Station the carriage met him from the Eyotts, with Sir Henry’s footmen in mourning. The Greshams were all very fond of Mary. He saw his mother as soon as he got to the house; but nothing was said between them for a long time. “Mary is to be buried here,” she began, finally. “I think it better; better than any place out of America.” Then, after a pause: “I have not dared to telegraph your father. I could not bear to have him know, all alone. He has not been well lately, I know; and is anxious about his business. I wrote him that Mary was ill, and begged him to come to France.”

The Greshams were very kind, and all was done that could be done. Clara Gresham seemed overcome with grief; she had loved Mary so dearly, and her visit was to have been such a happy one. She was a quiet, rather plain girl, but Vane found he could talk more easily with her than with any one else. His mother and he said very little when they were together.

One morning, at the breakfast table, Vane got a letter from America. Some presentiment made him conceal it from his mother, and not open it until he was alone. It was written in a tremulous hand, unlike his father’s, and told him they had lost everything. His father’s property, though large, was all involved in railways; and some panic had intervened at a critical moment and all had been swept away. “My poor boy,” the letter went on, “even your own little fortune is gone. Will you forgive me? You can bear it, I know, for you are young, and can make your own way; and your mother has loved me long enough to live with me these few last years in poverty; but when I think of Mary’s future, so different from what I had hoped, it breaks my heart. You must give up the lease of Monrepos and come to America directly.”

His mother divined bad news, immediately, and followed him, when he left the room; but she seemed almost happy to hear it was only their fortune they had lost, and not her husband. Her one idea was to get back to him in America; but, to do that they must first return to France. Their departure from the Greshams was hasty, and in the afternoon they were on their way to Brittany. His mother seemed very much broken; and he even feared for her mind at times. It was necessary to interrupt the journey at London and Dover; and it was with a feeling of relief that he found himself finally within the gates of home.

But Vane’s life was to begin with a crushing succession of sorrows. Mrs. Vane was impatient and nervous; and went hastily into the house while he turned to give some directions about the luggage. As he stood talking to the coachman, he heard a faint cry in the hall. He went quickly in, and found his mother fainting, another fatal yellow envelope beside her. It was a telegram from one of his father’s friends in New York, announcing his sudden death in that city.

It was with great difficulty that Mrs. Vane was brought back to consciousness at all; and when she revived, she was delirious. Vane knew nothing whatever about illness; but he carried her up-stairs himself and then drove to Rennes for another doctor, leaving the local practitioners in charge. It seemed so strange to be all alone, to have charge of the family affairs, to have no one to consult with or rely upon. But Mary, too, was dead.

So he drove into Rennes and brought a respectable old doctor, who talked gracefully about nothings, and looked at him curiously and not unkindly over his spectacles. He heard in a few words the story of his mother’s illness, but seemed more interested in Vane himself. “Ce beau jeune homme,” he said, tapping him playfully on the arm; “il ne faut pas gâter tout ça!” The young man somewhat impatiently shook him off and assured him that he was well. Arriving at the château, Dr. Kérouec went at once to the sick-room, but stayed there barely five minutes.

Yes, one could save her life; he had seen that directly. But, for the rest, he must get her at once to some place of security where she might have treatment—it was her only chance. But Vane said No to this; not until they were sure.

The next day she had recovered her strength, but was violently insane. They lived in the château a month and there was no change. Then the servants talked of going, and letters came from America telling Vane how complete his father’s ruin had been. He had been buried by his friends in New York, as Vane had directed by telegraph. Vane could no longer keep the château or even pay the household expenses. He must go to America to see what he could save of his father’s estate.

At the end of the month several physicians, most skilled in mental disorders, had a consultation on his mother’s case. The decision was unanimous—she was incurable. Could she live? Yes, with proper care, for years. Dr. Kérouec had a personal friend who made a specialty of these cases and took charge of only two or three patients at a time. Was this her only chance of getting well? Yes: if no chance could be called a chance. It was not an ordinary maison de santé, and here she would have the best of treatment, but it was expensive—fifteen hundred francs a month. Could she bear the journey to America? Never. Vane thanked the doctors and dismissed them all, except Dr. Kérouec.

That night, for many hours, the young man paced the courtyard under his mother’s window. At ten in the morning he asked to see the doctor and found him breakfasting.

“I have decided,” he said briefly. Dr. Kérouec extended his hand: “Ce brave jeune homme!” The next evening his mother was safely installed in the pretty little house near Rennes, where already Dr. Kérouec and his friend had privately made preparations. “And, my boy,” said Dr. Kérouec (who was rich and knew all the circumstances by this time), “it is customary to pay in advance only when my friend does not know ses gens. I have told him that you will pay at the end of the year.” Vane’s voice faltered as he thanked the doctor, but he produced a bank note for five thousand francs and insisted upon leaving it then.

That night Dr. Kérouec saw Vane safely on board the St. Malo packet. “I will care for her, my son,” he said, with a parting pressure of the hand. “Ce brave jeune homme,” he muttered, as he walked ashore and up the little Norman street, mopping his bald head (for it was a hot June evening) with a large red silk handkerchief.

III.

VANE had six hundred francs left; and, taking the Holyhead mail, the next evening he was on board the City of Richmond at Queenstown as a steerage passenger. He had been troubled with no further thoughts of adventure in the Soudan; and was quite indifferent as to his own dénouement. He spent a great deal of the time at sea walking on the deck; as a steerage passenger he was allowed to walk aft as far as the foremast. The other steerage passengers looked upon him as an intellectual young gentleman; probably a scholar in reduced circumstances.

Eighteen thousand francs a year, Vane was thinking; this, at least, he must have, for his mother could not be sent elsewhere. Gold was then at a premium, and this sum meant four thousand a year in America. Just the insignificant fortune he had lost; but could his labor be worth so much? This problem had filled his mind, and kept his temper sane. One who has to earn his bread has little time to sigh for things less possible of attainment. The natural animal motive atones for any want of others; no one is a pessimist who has to work for his living. The young man smiled a little at the thought that he, too, was going to America to seek his fortune—not to improve his future, but to amend what remained of the past. This one obvious, clear duty was before him then. Afterwards, he might see what the world had left for him.

One day about sunset he was sitting on the deck, reading a favorite book of his—an old Florentine edition of Petrarca. As he turned the leaves, a broken rose fell from them. It was a book which they—the English girl and he—had often read together; and, having no Bible (for, like all Frenchmen and many young men, he was rather a skeptic in matters of religion), he had thrown her rose hastily between the leaves. He was surprised a little, now, at his own want of sentiment. But those times already seemed so far off! He looked at the flower a moment; then picked it up, and dropped it in the sea. The leaves scattered as it fell, and were soon lost in the broad wake of the steamer.

Vane landed in New York among five hundred other steerage passengers. Of course the papers did not take the trouble to report the coming of so insignificant a person; nor did he call upon any of his social acquaintances. His first visit was to his father’s grave; then he went to see, at their down-town offices, such of his father’s business friends and correspondents as he knew by name. He had written Mr. Peyton—the one from whom the news had come—to suspend all decisive steps until he came. Mr. Peyton—as indeed were all who had known his father—was very kind; and told him the first thing to do was to get appointed administrator of his father’s estate. This being done, he called a meeting of his father’s creditors. Mr. Peyton had advised him to offer a settlement of sixty cents on the dollar; but he did not accept this suggestion. He told the creditors of Mr. Peyton’s advice, and added that he could probably pay at least seventy cents. But, he continued, his desire was to pay in full. His only hope of so doing was to be allowed to hold his father’s investments for a time, manage them judiciously, and avoid forced sales. Would they give him three years?

They were few in number, all capitalists, and co-operators with his father; and they were pleased with something in the young man’s manner. All except one could easily spare the money; and to him Vane, with the consent of the other creditors, gave his dividend of seventy per cent., and received his acquittances in full. And that night the other creditors, at a directors’ dinner, agreed that, while they had done a very foolish thing, they were anxious to see what young Vane would make of it.

Young Vane took two small rooms in the oldest house of a down-town street, for which he paid two dollars a week. And that autumn, Vane, who a few months before had barely admitted that the name Bellefontaine had a civilized sound, might have been seen riding on the cow-catcher of a locomotive in Northern Wisconsin, and estimating the probable earnings from freight when the forests about him were cut. When he got his father’s affairs into such shape that they could be managed from New York, he procured a clerkship in a banking-house in that city at six hundred dollars salary. And then for a year, his life was monotonous routine without a day’s rest. He rose at seven, prepared his own breakfast of bread and fruit, and was at the bank before nine. He lunched on a sandwich; left the bank at five, and walked to the Park and back. At seven he dined on a steak and a pint of ale. And such of his evenings as were not occupied with the care of his father’s estate, this practical young man of business gave, not to newspapers and stock reports, but to mediæval history and Italian poetry. It was his safety valve. He sometimes thought of writing a book on the social and political history of the Florentine republic. He steadily refused all invitations of his capitalist friends to dinner or other entertainments. He could now live with two suits of clothes, and, to accept their invitations, he would need three; moreover, he secretly feared that he could not bear his present mode of life if he had even a glimpse of any other. Only while alone could he forget that he was alone in the world. John, who was in the same banking-house, was the only man he knew; and many an evening John left a dinner, or was late at a party, that he might sit for an hour in the little back room in Washington Place.

At the end of the first year Vane took a week’s vacation, walking in the Catskills. Every week he had a letter from Rennes; and frequently one from Dr. Kérouec, telling him of no change in his mother’s condition. When he returned from his vacation, he was called into the counting-room of the senior partner, and given a check for four hundred dollars in addition to his first year’s salary of six hundred; and, moreover, was promoted to a position of three thousand a year salary. That first year, Vane had spent three hundred and eighty dollars in board and lodging, and eighty more in pocket money. He had bought no clothing, having brought all he needed from France. His travelling expenses had been large, but these he had charged to the account of his father’s estate. This left him five hundred and forty dollars to the good.

Vane then went to Mr. Peyton and borrowed three thousand dollars on his own security. This three thousand he sent to Dr. Kérouec; and five hundred dollars of his earnings he invested in a life-assurance policy payable to Dr. Kérouec as trustee for his mother. He thus had forty dollars in his pocket at the beginning of his second year.

By this time some of his father’s railways were beginning to get out of shallow water. Vane watched them carefully; and by judicious management and successful sales, he was able, on the first of August, eighteen hundred and seventy-six, the end of the three years allowed him, to pay his father’s creditors their claims in full—four hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars, with interest for three years at six per cent. And over and above this, after paying Mr. Peyton, he had sixteen thousand dollars, which he might call his own. Early in August he sailed for Brittany, and spent a week with Dr. Kérouec at Rennes.

His mother’s hair was now white; she was quiet, but still hopelessly insane, nor did she even recognize him.

Vane was back again on the first of September. When he presented himself at the bank, he was offered a responsible position, and a salary of six thousand dollars a year, with a hint of partnership in the near future. He now removed to lodgings in Eighteenth Street; and on going home that night, for the first time in two years he burst into a fit of crying. This turn of hysterics was the prelude to a low fever, of which he lay five weeks ill.

IV.

JOHN HAVILAND was with him a great deal of this time, and, on his recovery, took him severely to task for the life he had been leading. For three years he had been a mere machine—a blind, passionless, purposeful energy. A man, and a young man, could not live like that. What pleasure had he taken in all that time? And a young man, unless he has attained happiness, cannot live entirely without pleasure, even if it be true that he should not seek for it. And Haviland knew enough of Vane’s life to feel assured that there had not hitherto been much happiness. Moreover, Vane was a man of the world, and had been out of it for three years. It was unnatural. He should see something of the people of his own country. His mother was well; and would probably be the same for years. And he had been nearly three years in mourning. “Now,” John concluded, “I wish you to come to a dinner at our house on Friday.”

Vane smiled, and looked at his threadbare black suit—one of the original black suits—which had seen much service since he brought it over from France. But he pleasantly accepted John’s invitation, and forthwith visited his tailor. That afternoon, in the park, as he turned to come home from his walk, and saw the walls and spires of his own city harshly outlined before the sunset, he realized for the first time that he was a stranger in a strange land. For the first time, as he walked down Fifth Avenue, between the level, high wall of house fronts, with their regular squares of lighted windows, he caught himself wondering what was behind these windows. Now and then he saw a feminine silhouette on the white window-shades; in some houses, even, he could see into a lower room; there were usually pictures on the walls and often books, or bindings, on the shelves; there was frequently an old gentleman by the fireside, and always a young girl or two. It was piquant to catch these glimpses of the domestic hearth from the street; he remembered how impossible such visions were in the Faubourg, among the old hotels between court and garden.

As he thought of the newly discovered country he was soon to enter, so strange to him, he felt that he, also, was strange to himself. He tried to bring back his old nature of the boulevards, Longchamp and Trouville; but it seemed to him childish and obsolete; showy and senseless, like a pasteboard suit of stage armor. He did not regret it. He was a man and an American; men were earnest, life in America was earnest. He knew little of his own city; but he had read the current novels; and he thought that he had seen enough to know that the every-day life in America was tangible, material, and the life of society what it should be, a gay leisure, a surface of pleasure and rest. Now, in Paris it was the every-day life that was trivial; the theatres were filled with vaudevilles; but the tragedies were everywhere, off the stage. It was well, the young man felt, that he was an American; his life had begun too sternly for a more artificial state of society; he lacked more than other people, and he demanded more from the world.

So the Friday night in question found him arrayed in the normal evening costume of modern times. It wore somewhat awkwardly and strangely at first; and one or two little minutiæ of dress he did not know at all; as, whether gentlemen in America would wear gold studs, and how they tied their cravats. A waiter met him in the hall holding a plate, on which were several little envelopes, one of which bore his name. I suppose, thought he, in a country where there is no precedence, but much formality, this indicates whom we are to take in to dinner. He opened his envelope and found within a card, and written in a feminine hand Miss Baby Thomas. What an intolerable name!

Coming above into the reception room, his first impressions were decidedly favorable. John’s mother was a comely woman of that comfortable domestic sort known as motherly; she raised one’s opinion of human nature even by the way in which she sat down. The prevailing tone seemed refined, Vane thought. No more bad taste was visible than is unavoidable in a country where the head of a family dies in a finer house than the one he was born in. The women were charming in dress, and face and figure; but their voices were disagreeable, and they seemed to him a little brusque. In fact, the men, though rather awkward, seemed to have more social importance, if not better breeding.

So far had he progressed in his studies, when a voice over his shoulder said, “Miss Thomas—Mr. Vane.” Inferring that he was being presented, he turned quickly about, bowing as he did so. The young lady did not wait for him to begin, but at once rattled off a number of questions about himself and his foreign life. As the most of these she answered herself with an “I suppose,” or a “but of course,” Vane had leisure to observe her while she talked. She was pretty; admirably, sweetly pretty; there was no doubt of that; as pretty as masses of dead-black hair and eyes of intense gentian blue could make her. She had a lovely neck and hands; and a smile which seemed placed there with a divine foreknowledge of kisses. It was at once infantine, arch and gentle; and then there was a pretty little toss of the head and a shrug of the white, young shoulders. Vane looked at her curiously, a little condescendingly perhaps, as the first specimen of the natives he had seen. She did not seem to mind his looking at her. If a French girl had so calmly borne his glance, there would have been a little of the coquette in hers. But, after all, thought Vane,—this was charming; more ideal, more intelligent, sweeter than Paris—but it was not unlike Paris. The dress was certainly Parisian. She was better dressed than young ladies are in Paris. Her people must be very rich. Yet, he was disappointed. She was not American enough. She would have been quite in his mood of five years gone by. She was not like English girls; and he had hoped American girls were like them.

Vane had just finished this process of mentally ticketing her off, when she grew silent. The first quick rush of her conversation was gone. She seemed to be getting her breath and waiting for him. He did not quite know how to begin. This young lady reminded him of a glass of champagne. When you first pour it out, there is a froth and sparkle; then a stillness comes; if you wish a fresh volume of sparkles, you must drop something into it. A piece of sugar is best. Vane’s French breeding stood him in good stead: he began with a compliment.

After the dinner, the nine ladies disappeared from the room; and the nine men grouped themselves at one end of the table and smoked cigars over the sweetmeats. When the room was well filled with tobacco-smoke, they threw open the doors, and returned to the drawing-room. The ladies were grouped about, picturesquely, drinking tea; and the air was delicate with their presence. As the body of men moved in, it seemed a little like an incursion of the Huns into Italy.

The party kept together but a few moments more. Most of the men were sleepy; little was said by the women. It was as if there were nothing to talk about, or as if the men had eaten too much; but they had eaten very little. Vane was relieved when they got out of doors.

John walked back to his lodgings with him. The two young men found no lack of things to talk about. Haviland took still another cigar. “What did you think of the dinner?” said he finally. “I mean, the people?”

“I thought it was very pleasant,” said Vane, eluding the second form of the question. But Haviland recurred to it.

“I mean the people. Miss Thomas, for instance.”

“Miss Thomas, for instance,” said the stranger. “I think,” he continued, recalling to mind his mental label, “she is sweet-tempered, innocent, ambitious, and shallow.” Vane had formerly prided himself on some acquaintance with women of the world.

John laughed. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “But she will amuse you, and wake you up.” It seemed as if he were remembering something; then he laughed again. “You do not do her justice yet. She is one of the most entertaining and, in an innocent little way, exciting girls I know. I put her next you for that purpose.”

“Who is her father?”

“Oh, a stockbroker down-town. No one in particular. The family would not interest you.”

“None of the mammas were here to-night?”

“Dear me, no,” answered John. “Why do you ask?”

“I should like to see some of them; that is all.”

V.

AT this time Vane was not in the habit of thinking about women. He had found life particularly serious, and girls were not serious. Somewhat fatuously, perhaps, he fancied no woman under thirty could either understand him, or arouse his own interest. And most of the women over thirty were married. He understood that in America any intimacy with married women was out of the question; married women were quite given up to domestic duties, and kept out of society.

But Vane had certain theories of his own as to social observances, and he thought it his duty, after taking Miss Thomas in to dinner, to call upon her. He performed this duty (which afterwards became a pleasure) upon the following afternoon. He found her in a somewhat dingy house on East Fifteenth Street, but, though the setting was dull and commonplace, herself was even prettier than he remembered her, and simply and charmingly dressed. Vane was no amateur of bric-à-brac; he had no auctioneer’s eye, and, if a room was in perfect taste, did not commonly notice it at all; but glaring faults would force themselves upon him, and he could not help observing that, with the exception of the daughter’s dress, the household showed no evidence of knowledge of what is good in literature, art, or taste.

Except Miss Thomas. Always except Miss Thomas herself. She received him with much grace of manner, but seemed to have very little to say. Vane found that he had to talk largely against time; and this rather disappointed him at first. At first, but afterwards he decided that he liked this still mood best. There was no dimple and sparkle, but it was quiet and companionable. She is not like “a young lady,” Vane thought; still less like a French young lady. She is neither ingénue nor formée; she is young, bright, a good fellow. One might play Paul to her Francesca without a dénouement. How could he have thought her ill-trained? Though she had evidently thought little, read less, and been taught nothing at all, she had a sweet natural elegance of her own. Vane found time to observe all this between his sentences. They were not very well connected.

Was he going to Mrs. Roster’s ball? she had asked.—No, he thought not. He did not know her.—He had better go. Every one would be there.

“Then I fear I am no one,” said Vane. “I am not even invited.” He was sorry to fancy that her interest in him flagged a little after this. She had met him at a good house, but, after all, he might be a mere protégé of John Haviland’s. Mr. Haviland was always picking up queer people. A moment after this Vane took his leave.

Why should he not go to Mrs. Roster’s? he said to himself. He could not always be brooding on the addled eggs of the past. After all, the world was all that was left him, and in the world the dance still went on merrily, and maidens’ eyes were bright; leaves still were green, and the foam of the sea as white as ever, and wine still sparkled in the glass. He said this to himself with a somewhat sceptical grin, for, like most Frenchmen with whom he had lived, he took little pleasure in drinking. A Frenchman drinks to go to the devil: he rarely goes to the devil because he drinks. Yet he was, or at all events he had been, fond of society. He had liked light and gay faces, and bright conversation, and heartlessness—if there must be heartlessness—masked under suave manners and intellectual sympathy. Out of society the heartlessness was just as real, he had used to think, only ruder; there is at least as much snobbishness, and it is more offensively vulgar. He could not stay always out from all society. He must find something to pull him back into the world; he must get some grip of life. Hitherto his only foothold had been his clear necessity of making eighteen thousand francs a year to send to his mother.

He could probably have persuaded himself with much less reasoning if he had not had a secret inclination to go; but, as it was, he reasoned himself into it, and thought that he thought it was a bore. So he went to Mrs. Roster’s ball. Of course he admired the beauty of American women; the beauty of American women is like the Hudson River; one is bound to prefer it to the Rhine. He thought the party was very pretty and the dancing beautifully done, and, moreover, he made the acquaintance of several young ladies of quite a different type than Miss Thomas’s. They had plenty of breeding and intelligence, and talked the latest slang of culture to perfection, and were evidently of the great world, if they had not quite so much charm as she. Still none of these, as yet, were essentially American, or even very deeply English, though they dabbled in it.

Miss Thomas herself, for some reason unknown to Vane, did not receive quite so much attention as he had fancied that she would. It was not her fault, for she was charmingly dressed and never looked prettier.

As he was ready to leave he met her, for the first time, coming down the stairs in wraps and wanting her carriage.

“You have not spoken to me the whole evening,” said she softly, as she took his arm.

“I was afraid to, mademoiselle,” said Vane, half jocosely.

“Come to-morrow,” she whispered seriously. “It is my day for receiving, and I shall be so glad to see you.” Vane bowed his thanks, and the next moments were occupied in conveying herself and skirts safely into the coupé. As he was about to shut the door she extended her hand frankly: “You will come, won’t you?” Vane was a little puzzled; he took her hand awkwardly, and muttered something about being only too delighted. He had no experience whatever of American women, much less American girls. Why should she so particularly wish to see him? He called the next day, expecting to learn, but in that he was doomed to disappointment. Apparently Miss Thomas, if she had any reason, had forgotten it; she had very little to say, and the call was quite conventional and commonplace. “Bah!” he thought, as he walked home. “Here I have wasted half an afternoon over this girl simply because she asked me. Doubtless she herself had nothing better to do than waste it over me.” And perhaps he added secretly that his life was something more serious than hers, and, at all events, he had no mind for light flirtation.

VI.

NEVERTHELESS, some curious chance made him see a good deal of Miss Thomas. He was very apt to sit next her at dinner, even if he did not take her in. And whatever she might be, she certainly was not silly. She said very little, it is true; but it occurred to Vane one day that what she did say never placed her in a false or foolish position. Nor had he ever made a remark which she did not fully understand, in its full bearing and implication. Sometimes she affected—particularly if its nature was complimentary—to be wholly unconscious of its meaning; sometimes she would even ask an explanation. But a moment after, she was very apt to say or do some little thing which showed that she had understood it perfectly. Vane, who, in his flippant moods, was rather an adept at conversational fencing, and had flattered himself that very careful ground was quite unnecessary with Miss Thomas, gradually put more attention into his guard and more care in his attack. And when he saw, to continue his own metaphor, that his simple thrusts in quarte and tierce were easily parried and sometimes returned, he began to honor his adversary with a more elaborate attack. But, as he one day acknowledged to himself, though she had rarely touched him, yet he was not sure that he had ever got fairly under her own guard. Altogether, the more he saw of Miss Thomas, the more she interested him; and after the serious struggles of the day, he quite enjoyed his little playful evening encounters with so charming a feminine adversary. For he began to admit to himself that she was charming—there was no doubt of that. And meantime (so he fancied) the intercourse with her happy, simple nature was having a beneficial influence on his own.

For the past three years his attitude had been one of stern courage, of self-renunciation. But, after all, why should even he be always shut out from the spring? Flowers still bloomed in the world, summer followed winter, and this pretty little butterfly that fluttered near him might, after all, bring him healthier thoughts from her own air than he found in his morbid life. What a sharp inquisitor is one’s own self! What a cross-examiner of hidden motive! And what a still sharper witness is that self under inquisition! Vane never took his young friend seriously; and felt a need of excusing himself for trifling, as he thought.

John suddenly asked him, one day, what he thought of Miss Thomas now, and whether he had changed his views at all. “I was very much struck with your first diagnosis,” he said. “At a moment’s study, you gave the popular opinion of her; that she was gay, shallow, good-humored, and ambitious—and you might have added clever, rather than innocent.”

Vane was a little displeased.

“I think that I and the world were wrong,” said he. “She is not shallow, but she is humble rather than vain; as for ambition, she is perhaps too much without it; and I should not be surprised if somewhere about her pretty little self she had a true woman’s heart, which she is not yet conscious of.”

John laughed. “Look out, old man,” said he; “only a poet is allowed to fall in love with his own creation. Never say I have not given you fair warning. Ten Eyck was very attentive to her at one time; and the world believed that she wanted to marry him. But he was appointed chargé d’affaires at London; and left her without bringing matters to an issue. Since then, when he has been back in New York once or twice, he has entirely dropped her.”

“And do you mean to say that she still cares for him after that?”

“So the world thinks; and the world is apt to be right in such matters.”

“Bah!” said Vane. “No woman could care for a man who had once led her to believe he loved her, and left her.”

“Humph!” answered John. “That may be true of woman in the abstract; but I am not sure of its truth in this longitude. It is easier to judge woman in general than a New York girl in particular.”

“At all events,” said Vane, “I give her full leave to try her skill on me, skilful as you say she is. Indeed, if you think she is fair game for what you call a flirtation, you have removed my only scruples.”

“Very well, old boy—go in. But Miss Thomas once told another girl that she could understand any man in two days’ acquaintance. Don’t go in too deep.”

“Nonsense!” thought Vane when John had left. “I flatter myself I am beyond her hurting. It is pleasant enough to have her as a friend. I wish I could wish to marry her.” And he called to his mind Brittany and that last rose. “But I am sorry if she really can still care for that man. Ten Eyck was his name? I should be sorry to like her less. How strange these American women are! Now, in France—Bah!” he broke off, “it can’t be true; and, after all, what do I care if it is?”

Vane liked her very much, and thought her very much underrated by the world; and the same afternoon, by way of vindication, he went to her house and made a long call, tête-à-tête. He had fallen into an easy companionship with her, which made her society a delightful rest and respite from the earnest stress and strain of his life, of any man’s life. They were beginning to have numerous little confidences as to people and things; views shared by them only, which gave them little private topics of conversation, nooks of thought, where they met. Thus Vane could quite shut out a third party from the conversation, and keep Miss Thomas to himself. Her cultivation and taste surprised him more and more as he knew her. This pretty little New York girl, naturally half-spoiled and petted, brought up in a particularly bourgeois household, never having been out of it and New York, had yet a range of mind and appreciation quite equal to anything he could bring her in books or in conversation. The people about her seemed totally different—different in views, in taste, in appearance, in manner. Yet she never seemed discontented at home—a common fault of children in a country where they improve upon their parents. She moved among them modestly and lovingly, like a princess unconscious of her royalty. All this thought Vane, and marvelled.

He found that even his peculiar tastes were shared. It has been mentioned that this successful young business man had a secret taste for Italian poetry. This he had been used to indulge alone; but on his mentioning it, she spoke with enthusiasm of the sweet old mediæval terza rima. Having little opinion of women’s power of purely ideal enjoyment, he had at first doubted the sincerity of this taste. Still, he brought around some old verses one day; and soon it became his habit, instead of reading alone, to pass an evening or two in a week reading with her. And so during the winter, with double the pleasure he had ever known before, they went through the familiar pages of Ariosto, Tasso and Dante. The fifth canto of the Inferno remained, however, her favorite; and with the light of her eyes upon the text Vane made a much better translation than Byron or Cary ever dreamed. She was never tired of hearing the passage beginning “Siede la terra dove nata fui.” And much practice in translation makes perfect.

Thus, thanks to Miss Thomas and a little sight of the lighter rim of life, Vane passed a winter which, if not happy, was at least less bitter than he had known for years. In the natural course of events, society pronounced him attentive to Miss Thomas; but Vane cared little for that. His character was not of the mould which cares what the world says. He did not believe that her life was very happy, either; and he thought they were both the better for their friendship. The more he saw of her, the less he doubted that she had at one time cared for some one, Ten Eyck or another; though, of course, for him she would never care again. After all, she was his superior; she had kept her sweet self above her sorrow, he had not. How he had misinterpreted her that first evening! Now he saw she was a woman, in all the glory of her womanhood, strong, gentle, and true.

Vane went back to Brittany in the June of the summer following. One of his last calls was upon Miss Thomas, and she chided him with not making it the very last. However, the call lasted three hours. Twenty times Vane rose to go, and each time was detained by some pretext or another of Miss Thomas. There is a sweet pleading manner of urging a wish, even a selfish one, that makes you feel as if you were doing yourself a favor in gratifying it. Miss Thomas had this manner, which few men, particularly strong men, can resist. Vane always yielded. He would as soon have thought of putting a pet canary through the manual of arms as of resisting it. In this way Vane’s visit was prolonged, and when he went home he admitted to himself that it had been a very charming one. He thought she was a lovely woman, and wished some nice fellow would marry her. What a gentle, sunny nature she had! And what a lovely type of the best American women, so different both from the French and English, so natural, so pure, and yet so bright and charming. “At least,” thought Vane, “if I ever go back to France to live I shall have seen some things wholly worthy of admiration in my own country.” He was sorry if she really cared (as she had seemed to) that he had called upon her two days before his departure. She had been very kind to him that winter, and it certainly would have been more empressé to have called upon her last. Vane stopped on his way to Jersey City the morning of the steamer’s sailing, and procured a superb mass of roses. These he sent to Miss Thomas with his card: “From her sincere friend.” It was the last thing he did in America.

VII.

VANE stayed with old Dr. Kérouec in Rennes, and found the good physician kinder than ever. He always called Vane “my son” now, and he had to submit to numerous embraces, a proceeding he did not like, for in his manners Vane had that clumsiness in expressing anything emotional, that Gothic phlegm, about which Saxons grow vainglorious, and for which Celts detest them.

Every day Vane walked in the garden with his mother—a painful duty, for she never remembered him. Her dementia was quite harmless now, and she sometimes spoke to Vane of himself, not knowing him, but never mentioned his father. Curiously enough her talk was much of Mary, and of the English girl who had been the object of his boyish affections. Vane heard casually of her marriage that summer, and was more surprised than pleased to find how little the news affected him.

Once in a while, however, he caught himself wondering what Miss Thomas was doing; and a week after his arrival he received a note from her to thank him for the flowers he had sent. She also said that they were at some place in Pennsylvania for the summer, far from the madding crowd, but she found the place very stupid and the people inane. There was nothing to do there. The men were all young Philadelphians, she wrote, and generally uninteresting. Vane was glad to get the note, and of course never thought of replying.

At this time Vane was a handsome, erect fellow, with a large aquiline nose, and heavy eyebrows shading quiet eyes. Most of the people knew him well as the doctor’s protégé. One day the good old doctor came to him with an air of much mysterious importance. He passed Vane’s arm through his, and led him to his favorite walk up and down the garden. “My son,” he began, tapping him on the shoulder, and beginning in a way he evidently thought to be diplomatic, “you are growing older, and it is not good for you to be alone. Listen! it is time you should marry.”

Vane looked up quickly, and then struggled to repress a smile.

“Listen, my child,” continued the doctor, much pleased, “I have to propose a parti of the most charming—but of the most charming! My wife’s own cousin and two hundred thousand livres of dot! What say you?”

Vane was touched, and found it hard to answer.

“My child,” the old man went on, “I love you like my own son—my own son, see you? You are not noble de naissance—mais, le cœur—d’ailleurs, neither are you rôturier, non plus. I have spoken of you to Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-aigue, and Madame la Comtesse veut bien. Her daughter is charming—but a child adorable! You will let me present you comme futur—what say you?”

Vane bent over and took the hand of his old friend. “My father,” he said, “I would do more for you than for any one living. You have been more than a father to me. God bless you for it! But this I cannot do. I shall never marry.” Vane spoke seriously and with some tragic effect, like a Manfred or a Werther.

The old man sighed deeply. He knew Vane too well to press the matter. “Ah!” said he, “you say you will never marry. I know better. You have seen some American—quelque petite Américaine rusée. Hélas! and we might all have been so happy.” The doctor said no more on the subject, but was sad and quiet during the rest of Vane’s visit.

He said nothing afterwards, except on Vane’s departure. Then he pressed his hand: “Ah, consider, my child. A young girl of the most charming—of the most charming—and two hundred thousand livres of dot!” Vane could only press his hand in return. And the last he saw of the doctor, he was standing still upon the Dieppe pier, rubbing his nose with an immense silk pocket-handkerchief.

This was Vane’s fifth trip across the Atlantic; and for the first time, he felt glad when the vessel’s prow turned westward. Brittany, for him, represented the past; America the future. He was an American, after all. A day after his arrival he would be immersed in Wall Street—up in all the mysteries of exchange and rates, the stock-list his breviary and the ribbon of telegraph paper his oracle. Meanwhile, however, he dozed on the deck and essayed metrical translations of Boccaccio. He was reading the tale of the pot of basil one day, and thought for about half a morning of Miss Thomas. What she had to do with his reading, he could not see. But she was quite the most interesting figure in his mental gallery. A curious jumble was this modern state of society. Bare flowers sprang up in strange parterres; exotics grew outside of hot-houses, and common whiteweed inside. There ought to be some method of social transplanting; some way of grafting new blossoms on an old stock. But all American stock was good; American society was like a world of rounded pebbles grating on a beach; the buried pebbles were quite as fine as those on top; only these were more stirred and polished, so their colors came out best. And yet what common, poor stuff most of them were, after all! A pleasant trade, that of social lapidary! And Vane, perhaps for the first time, took note of the women around him. There was a Philadelphia girl, pretty and voluble; there was a young lady from Michigan, who had been to “college” in Massachusetts and finished herself abroad, alone, or in company with a dear friend from Connecticut. There was a girl from Cleveland, wealthy, marvellous, indescribable; and a young lady from New Orleans, with all the fire drawn from her cheeks into her eyes. There was a girl—a young woman, a young lady—a being feminine, from Boston, weighing and analyzing all things within her somewhat narrow mental horizon; and a social entity from New York, also of the feminine variety, but of orbit predicable and conventional eccentricities, her life a function of two variables, money and fashion. All these women were fair, and strange to him; and this, perhaps, was the only day of his life that he had definitely considered women from a contemporary point of view. His assured income was now eight thousand a year. Four of this went to his mother, three he spent; the rest he saved.

Coming back to New York, he plunged into a mass of accumulated duties; it was a week before he found time to see anything of John; and two weeks before he called on Miss Thomas. He found her in a rather different mood than usual; a little sadder, a shade more self-conscious. “It is two weeks before you come to see me, and you did not answer my letter,” she said.

Vane could only bow. “If I had only known you wished me to,” he said.

“Ah, well! And what have you seen abroad?”

“Nothing of interest to me now.”

“And what are you going to do this winter?”

“I do not know. Stick to my trade,” Vane added laughingly.

“And shall we not go on with our reading?”

“I should be only too happy.”

“What a conventional expression of willingness—what an enthusiastic acceptance!”

“Conventions are the safest expressions of the truth.”

“What do you mean by ‘safest’?”

“The safest to me.”

She gave a little laugh, in which Vane joined. “I do not understand you.”

“You mean you are too skilful a fencer to admit it.”

“What do you mean by ‘fencing’?”

“The manner of our conversations.”

“You mean that it is not sincere—that it is badinage? Why do you do it, then?”

“I am only too ready to change our ground.”

“I do not know what you mean.”

Vane bowed his disbelief in this remark and rose to go.

“Ah! do not go yet. I am so lonely to-day, and it is just the hour of the day when there is nothing to do. I have no work and my poor eyes are too weak to read. They are not even useful!”

“Why do you imply they are not ornamental? Why do you say what you do not mean?”

“But I do mean it.”

“You know you have lovely eyes.”

“I thought you never made compliments,” she said with a little pleased laugh.

“You see your weak eyes are strong enough to keep me here.” And rising to go, he extended his hand.

“Ah! do not go yet.” And taking his hand, she almost detained it gently. “I am so glad to see you once more.”

Vane laughed again. “Have you read De Musset’s ‘Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée’?”

“No; but I will read it. Why?”

“Because my calls resemble that one. I am continually opening the door to go. Now if my call could have the same ending!” he added gallantly.

She colored. “She has read it,” thought Vane. “Halte-là!” And this time, perhaps rather precipitately, he took his leave for good. Miss Thomas gave another of her little pleased laughs, after he had closed the door. Vane had been thoroughly amused, and walked in a very contented frame of mind to John’s. Coming into his smoking-room, he took a cigar and threw himself at full length upon the lounge. He could afford occasionally to smoke and take life easily now; it was different with him from the times, three years back, when he used to get his own breakfast in the little rooms on Washington Place.

“Well, old man, how goes it?” said John, looking up with a light of friendship in his gray eyes which Vane’s coming always brought to them.

“Capitally! I have been passing the afternoon with Miss Thomas.”

“And how was she? Fascinating as ever?”

“Fascinating is not the word I like to use of her. It implies conscious effort.”

Vane was evidently off on a thesis, and Haviland settled himself on the sofa with a pipe. “I have seen many women whom the world calls fascinating, and they never attracted me at all. We look, admire and pass on. Now, Miss Thomas has all the brightness of a woman of the world, with the simplicity of a country maiden. If she has any charm, it is because she is just herself, as Nature made her.” Vane spoke with the air of a knight defending abandoned beauty.

“By the way (if you have finished your essay on an inamorata), I saw Ten Eyck to-day. He has come back from London, with a chance of being ambassador to Madrid, and is a better match than ever.”

“Ten Eyck? Who is Ten Eyck? Oh! I remember. Well, and what of it?” Vane added, after a pause.

“Oh! nothing, nothing at all. He is the son of one of our New York Senators, you know; and has a brilliant future before him.”

“Bah! The most brilliant future a woman can have is a future with a man who loves her.”

“And where did you pick up that aphorism? Not from your French education, surely? I believe Miss Thomas loves him.”

“I may not be up in American ideas, John, owing to the French education you sneer at; but I certainly was brought up to resent a remark like that, made of a young girl I like.”

“I don’t see what there is insulting in saying that a woman—for she is a woman, as you yourself admit—loves a man. I think it rather a compliment. American women rarely do, I can assure you. Their natures are like a New England spring—the sun must do a devilish deal of wooing before even so much as a green tendril is visible.” And Haviland, who was just then devoted to the young lady of Puritan descent whom he has since married, fetched a deep sigh.

Vane began to laugh again.

“Well, well. In time, I, too, shall become a New Yorker. And by the way, John, speaking of that—is it customary here to invite a young lady to go to walk with you?”

“Why, certainly, if you like. Miss Thomas has gone many a time, I fancy.”

“I was not thinking of Miss Thomas,” said Vane, pettishly.

VIII.

VANE had not intended to go to Mrs. Roster’s ball the next night; but he went, nevertheless. Vane was always a rather cynical spectator at large parties in New York. Somehow, it was so different from all that he had hoped; it was so like Paris, with more frivolity and fewer social gifts. A cynic is commonly a snubbed sentimentalist, who takes it out in growling. Vane had sought the world because he was lonely; but it seemed to him more than ever that he was much less lonely when alone. It is isolation, not loneliness, that saddens a man of sense; for his sense tells him that it is the world which is likely to be right, and proves him a solitary fool.

This evening Vane did devote himself to Miss Thomas; and a charming conversation they had. “You are quite different from what I thought you were,” she said. “I used to think you were serious and queer.”

“Really,” said Vane; “and what do you think me now?”

“At least, I do not think you serious and queer. Certainly, not serious.”

“But I am.”

“Can that be?” There was a heightened color in her cheek.

“As you see me. Will you go to walk with me next Sunday afternoon?”

Miss Thomas looked up suddenly with her soft eyes; then as suddenly cast them down again. Vane must have seen that she blushed a little.

“Yes.” And then, “if you do not leave Fifth Avenue,” she added.

“After that I shall certainly ask you to go into the Park,” he said.

“You had better not—at least not before the Sunday afternoon—or I will not go with you at all,” laughed Miss Baby, roguishly.

Vane bent and took her hand for a moment; as it hung among the orange leaves in the conservatory. Then he bowed and left her without an apology. She did not draw her hand away; and as Vane looked back at her from the door she was, this time, blushing violently. Vane himself walked home in a somewhat agitated frame of mind, and went to sleep; and when he woke up in the morning, he discovered that he was very much in love with Baby Thomas. This discovery caused him more surprise than disapproval; and yet he felt bound to confess himself a good deal of a fool.

He thought of it several times during the day, in the intervals of business, and not without considerable mental invective. However, as he walked home in the afternoon, he became less out of humor with himself. She certainly was a very charming girl, and well worth winning. At all events it was pleasant to be in love with her. He expected to see her that evening, and the prospect gave him a great deal of happiness, not without a slight seasoning of excitement, that made quite a novel enjoyment in his life. Certainly, he reflected, he was very much in love. It was surprising how it had grown in the night—like Jack and his bean-stalk. However, he saw no particular reason why he should try to cut it down. Perhaps he secretly doubted whether he could do so if he chose; and the doubt was agreeable.

Miss Thomas was not at the party that evening; and Vane found himself a little uneasy in consequence. He left early, and went to see John Haviland.

“John,” said he, “I am in love with Miss Thomas.”

“Many of us have been through that,” said John, calmly; “it is not fatal.”

“But,” said Vane, “my constitution may be more delicate. I am not a hide-bound rhinoceros.”

“Neither,” said John, “am I.” And he defended the aspersion upon his epidermis with a quadrupedal sigh.

“But I want to marry her.”

“That is also a symptom. You need not do it, however.”

“What do you know against her?”

“Nothing; but Ten Eyck has rather too heavy a prior mortgage.”

“I don’t care for Ten Eyck.”

“The question is, whether she does.”

“I know very well that she can’t.”

“She would hardly wish you to know the opposite, if the opposite were true.”

“Bah! I know something about women——”

“The devil himself can’t know a woman who doesn’t know herself.”

“Anyhow, it is a free field——”

“And plenty of favor.”

“She hasn’t seen Ten Eyck for years——”

“The last time was this afternoon.”

“What?”

“I saw them walking on Fourth Avenue, as I came up-town in a horse-car.”

“Humph!” said Vane, and he dropped the conversation.

For some weeks he said nothing more to John about Miss Thomas; and during that time he was trying, with more or less success, to persuade himself of his own folly. But he found it more easy to bend his energies to the subjugation of Miss Thomas’s heart than of his own. And John noticed that he left his business rather earlier in the afternoon than usual, and always took the Fourth Avenue car up-town. In his evenings he exhausted a large part of the most cynical French literature in convincing himself that he was a fool. But in spite of Balzac and Scribe, he found that he looked forward anxiously to the evenings when he was to meet her; and it was more easy for him to laugh at his own infatuation—no, interest was the name he gave it—than to go for a couple of days without seeing its object.

The first Sunday that he let pass without a visit, he was very nervous all the evening, and going to bed early made a vain effort to sleep. What a—qualified—fool he was, and yet how he did love that girl! He got up and read Heine by way of disillusion, and opened the book at the quatrain,

“Wer zum ersten Male liebt
Sei’s auch glücklos, ist ein Gott;
Aber wer zum zweiten Male
Glücklos liebt, Der ist ein Narr.”

How good! How very good! And Vane laid the book down with much applause.

Decidedly the best way to win Miss Thomas was to give her her own way. He could leave her to her own devices for a time. If she loved Ten Eyck, there was nothing to be done by seeing her; if she did not, a little delay would do no harm. If she loved nobody, his chance was assured.

This settled, Vane went to bed with the easy mind of a general who has planned the morning’s march.

IX.

VANE’S strategy was doubtless perfect; but in the morning he found a note sealed and superscribed in a charmingly pretty feminine hand. “Dear Mr. Vane,” it began, “Miss Roster’s skating party has been given up. She begged me to tell you; but, as I have not seen you, I feel obliged to send you this note. If you have nothing better to do, why will not you come that evening? It is so long since we have read together.—Winifred Thomas.”

“Now,” thought Vane, “why should Miss Roster send word to him by Miss Thomas?” He felt that he could not be positively rude, so at eight in the evening he presented himself. Miss Thomas was apparently alone in the house. She was sitting in the parlor, with no light but that of the fire, into which she was looking with her deep blue eyes; her face was pale, except that one cheek was rosy with the heat, imperfectly screened from the flame with her fan. She received Vane coldly; he drew up a chair, noticing, as he did so, her foot, which was covered only with a slipper and a thin web of open-work black stocking, and was very pretty.

Miss Thomas seemed distraite and depressed; he had never seen her in that mood before, and sought in vain to draw her into conversation. She answered only in monosyllables and still looked dreamily into the fire. Vane felt as if he had unwittingly offended her. Finally, just as he rose to go—

“Why are you so strange to-night?”

“I—I?” stammered Vane.

“Yes.” She lifted her small head and looked full at him. It seemed as if there was a tear lost somewhere in the depth of her eyes. Vane became conscious that he was a brute, and thought for the first time, odd as it may seem, of the walk which he had asked her to take the Sunday before. He had forgotten the walk entirely.

“I had suddenly to go to Pittsburg.” This was true; but he had returned on the Saturday. And yet he felt that he must say something, if only to suppress his growing inclination to take her hand in his.

“What do you mean?” said she wonderingly. They were both sitting; Vane staring at her helplessly.

“Why, when I broke our engagement to go to walk——” Truly he was floundering more than ever.

“Oh! were we engaged to go to walk?”

A pretty mess he had made of it indeed.

“I am only too glad you have forgotten,” he said; and then rising, with an awkward bow, he got himself and his shattered reputation for savoir faire out of the room. After putting on his overcoat, he turned back to the threshold of the parlor. “Will you go to walk next Sunday?” he asked bluntly.

“I must go to church that afternoon. I am so sorry.”

Vane bowed again, and took his departure more piqued than he was willing to acknowledge. As he went down the steps he heard a few chords upon the piano. It was the beginning of the love-song from Francesca da Rimini. After all, he thought, why should he be offended? She had behaved just as he should have wished her to. He could hardly expect her to acknowledge that she had waited for him in vain. How pretty she had looked in the firelight!

The next Sunday, about sunset, as he and John were returning from a long walk in the country, two figures came out of a small church on Sixth Avenue, well known for the excellence of its music. Miss Thomas was one, the other John recognized as Ten Eyck. She did not seem to see them, but the two walked rapidly ahead of them the length of the block, and then turned down a side street. Vane pretended to be wholly unconscious of the scene. John alone gave a grunt of surprise. And for two weeks or more Vane treated Miss Thomas with alternate neglect and familiarity when he met her in society; the former when he found it possible to avoid her, the latter when he was necessarily thrown with her. One night at a german she gave him a favor. Vane, after dancing with her, felt obliged, in common politeness, to talk with her for a few moments. He sought refuge in that sort of clumsy pleasantry which our English models have taught us to call chaff; she said nothing, but looked at him wonderingly, with large troubled eyes. She seemed as if grieved at his manner and too proud to reproach him with it. Could she really love the man? thought Vane. How could she? He felt as if the suspicion did her an injury. Vane’s heart melted to her as he came home that night. He had mentally judged her as he would have judged a woman in one of his cynical French comedies. He had treated her like a character in a seventeenth century memoir. And how much above such judgment was this sweet American girl! She was fond of her friends, and true to them, and frank to him, so that he saw that she cared for him. What did she know of the world, or of older societies, or the women in his wicked French memoirs? She lived in new, pure, honest America; not in the chronicles of the Œil-de-bœuf. And Vane felt that the best amends he could make was to ask her to become his wife. When he hinted this intention to Haviland that philosopher, for the first and only time in his life, improvised a couplet:

“Jamais la femme ne varie,
Bien fol est toujours qui s’y fie.”

Having got off this gâtha, John retired to his pipe, and became, like a Hindoo god, impassive, ugly, and impenetrable.

X.

FOR some weeks Vane rested satisfied with the conclusions arrived at in the last chapter. It was so satisfactory to have made such a resolve; and besides, there was no cause for hastening the event. There was singularly little impulse in his inclination. Most certainly, he meant to put his fate to the test; but not at point-blank range. Vane was cool enough to proceed warily; and he still clung sufficiently to the precepts of his French authorities in matters feminine to know better than that. For a repulse always puts the garrison on its guard, and doubles the difficulty of investment; and a woman’s heart should be taken by siege, not assault. Other supplies should be cut off; and then the citadel be undermined and sapped in a quiet way. The attacker should imply boundless admiration, without actually committing himself to a more particular sentiment—flirtation from behind earthworks—and so, without being exposed to rebuff, gradually surround her with such an atmosphere of incense that at last it becomes indispensable to her; and, after one or two futile sallies, she falls before his arms. This is the wisdom of the serpent; but Vane knew that it was never wasted on a woman, however sweet and dovelike; if you wish her to take your attentions seriously, you should make her think they are not serious. And if Vane was willing to marry, he had no mind to be refused. When Vane expounded these theories to John, the latter seemed relieved.

A lover in New York is at no loss for opportunities to win, if he has leisure to woo; but Vane suffered many chances to pass by without improving them. Perhaps he was dissatisfied with his love, with himself, with his life as he found it; he remembered, like all boys, trying to live as if he were the hero of a novel; now it was altogether too difficult not to live like the hero of a comedy. Vane abhorred the eighteenth century, and all its belongings; but it seemed to him that the world around him, and himself as part of it, were subjects apter to a Congreve than a Homer.

All the more, he sought to wind his affections around their object; he would not admit to himself that there was something wanting even in her. But the winter was nearly over before he resolved to take any decisive step; and Miss Thomas had been growing prettier every day. Mrs. Levison Gower was to give a sleigh-ride. They were to drive in a procession of single sleighs, and stop at some one’s country house for an hour’s skating. This opportunity would be most propitious; and Vane decided that Miss Baby Thomas should be his companion.

Miss Thomas seemed really very sorry. Vane admitted this afterwards, when he sought to reason himself out of his consequent ill-humor. But she was already engaged to ride that day in Mr. Wemyss’s sleigh. It was so unfortunate, and she was so much disappointed! Vane, however, decided to postpone his proposal of marriage to some other occasion; so he drove out sedately with the young and beautiful chaperone. With her he made no sufficient effort at flirtation, and Mrs. Gower never forgave him the omission.

The ice was very good; and Vane was disporting himself meditatively in one corner of the pond when Miss Thomas whirled by him on the “outer edge.” Miss Thomas was a beautiful skater; and, as she passed, she stretched out a crooked cane as if inviting him to join her. Vane had no desire to refuse; and in a minute the two were rolling along in strong, sweeping curves, the girl’s blue eyes gleaming with excitement beneath their long black lashes. Her eyes had the still, violet blue of a cleft in a glacier; Vane could not help looking into them once or twice. The ice was broken.

Neither of them had much to say; but for an hour or more they skated together. The crooked stick, proving too long, was soon discarded; and they skated hand in hand. On the shore, Wemyss was devoting himself to the matron. He could not skate.

Finally, the signal of recall was given. Miss Thomas made no movement in the direction of the return, and Vane was naturally too polite to make the first. They could see Mrs. Gower at the other end of the pond, skurrying about, like a young hen after her chickens. Suddenly Miss Thomas discovered that they ought to go back; but when they returned to the shore they were the last of the party, and had the log, which served the purpose of a seat, to themselves. Vane stooped to take off his companion’s skates, and in shaking them free Miss Thomas brought the blade of one across his hand with some force, causing a slight scratch on the back of his finger. She gave a little cry of horror, and then, as the finger bled profusely, pulled out her own handkerchief, and, before Vane could prevent her, bound it around the wound.

“It was my fault,” said she. “You can give the handkerchief to me when we next meet.”

As they walked back, Vane, dropping behind, unwound the handkerchief and put it in an inside pocket, then drew his glove hastily over the scratch, which had already stopped bleeding.

Going home, Mrs. Gower found Vane much more interesting. The heat of the noon had melted the snow, so that the sleighing was not good, and it was dusk before they got into the city. But when Vane left Mrs. Gower’s house for his own dinner, the sleigh which contained Miss Thomas had not returned, though Wemyss was there, having driven back with Miss Bellamy. Coming to his rooms, Vane unfolded the little handkerchief and kissed it; and that night, when he went to sleep, it was in his hand beneath the pillow. In the morning, he looked at it. It was a cheap little thing enough, made of pieces of linen or muslin stuff, looking like dolls’ clothes sewed together, but giving the effect of lace at a distance.

Vane went to a store on Broadway and purchased a handkerchief of the same size, of old point lace, and the same afternoon called upon Miss Thomas. “I have brought you your handkerchief,” said he, giving her the one he had bought, folded up. “I am very much obliged to you for lending to me.”

Miss Thomas took it, looked at it for a moment, then at him and thanked him. “It was of no consequence,” said she. “It was an old one.” Vane went home, much excited, perhaps a trifle disturbed in mind. Such a rapid victory had hardly been foreseen by him. She had taken from him, as a present, a valuable bit of lace; which must certainly mean that she would take him, if he offered himself. And he was not quite sure, now that the prospect was so near, that he really wished to marry Miss Baby Thomas. He liked her immensely, and she certainly amused him more than any other girl he knew; but he was not quite sure that he wished to marry—at all. Now that the prize was within his reach, he shrank back a little from plucking it. Four years ago, in Brittany, Vane had felt himself an old man; but now it seemed that he was “ower young to marry yet.” These thoughts gave him much trouble; and in the meantime he abstained from further complication by not calling on Miss Thomas, and, at the same time, subjected himself to much self-analysis. Could he honestly be content to go through life with this girl by his side? He knew enough of life to know that it mattered very little how often a man made a fool of himself, if he did not do so on the day when he got married. Now Miss Thomas was certainly a very nice, sweet girl—but did he love her enough to marry her? The outcome of his deliberation was in the affirmative; but—another but.

Ten days had elapsed since he gave her the handkerchief, when finally, one Sunday afternoon, he called to see her. He half expected that he should ask her to marry him. But he did not do so. When the call was nearly over, she excused herself for a moment, and, going up-stairs, returned with the handkerchief in her hand. “You have brought back the wrong handkerchief,” said she. Vane started with a shock of surprise he could not repress.

“I—I brought the wrong one?” he said awkwardly.

“Yes.”

“It was the one you gave me.”

“Oh, no! it was not. This one is real lace.”

“The—the washerwoman must have made a mistake.”

Miss Thomas said nothing.

“You must keep it all the same, Miss Thomas.”

“I cannot keep what belongs to other people,” said she unappreciatively.

Vane bit his lips. “I—I will make it right with the washerwoman,” said he clumsily.

Miss Thomas’s look was more hopelessly unsympathetic than ever; and, folding the bit of lace, she laid it on the table by his elbow.

“The fact is,” Vane went on, with a pretended burst of confidence, “the one you lent me was ruined: so I did get this one instead. Please take it.”

“It is much more valuable than mine,” said she coldly.

“Please take it,” said Vane again, with the iteration of a school-boy.

Miss Thomas began to take offence.

“How can you expect me to do such a thing?” said she, rising as if to dismiss him. Evidently a bold push was necessary. He took the bit of lace and threw it quickly into the open fire, counting on the feminine instinct which would not suffer her to see old lace destroyed. With a little cry, Miss Thomas bent down and pulled it from the coals.

“Let it burn,” said he, rising and putting on his gloves. “If you do not want it, I am sure I do not.” And he silently refused to take the handkerchief, pretending to busy his hands with his hat and cane. “Good-by,” said he.

“Good-by,” replied Miss Thomas, coldly, laying the handkerchief back on the centre-table.

When Vane got to the hall he looked at her a moment in turning to open the front door. She was standing before the fire with a heightened color in her face, whether of a blush or anger he could not tell.

XI.

VANE went home much discontented with himself. He had not only behaved like an ass, but he had made a blunder. He had gone much further than he meant to in seeking not to go so far. And he found that he loved her more than he thought, now that he had displeased her. He wanted diversion that night, and did not know what to do. Miss Thomas was his usual diversion. John was away. Finally, after dinner, he happened into Wallack’s theatre—it was the interval between the first and second acts. The first person that he saw was Miss Thomas, and a young man in evening dress was seated next her. Vane paid little attention to the play, and at the end of the second act he went out without speaking to her.

This was simply incredible! Vane could not conceive of it. It was a pitch of innocence beyond the range of imagination of a man educated in France. This was America with a vengeance. It must be that she did not care what people said. Could she know that bets were made at the club upon the state of her own affections and the sincerity of her admirers? Vane was much offended. He was angry with her for her own sake. At first he thought he would go and tell her so; then he reflected that the affair of the handkerchief would put him in rather a false position, and, after all, she was not worth the trouble. For the present, at least, he would not go near her.

The next night Vane went to a “german” at Mrs. Haviland’s. Miss Thomas was there dancing with Mr. Wemyss. She received him very pleasantly. He danced with her once or twice, and then sat down beside her, Wemyss not coming back. Miss Thomas was dressed in a white, cloudy dress, with sprays of violet and smilax. A wreath of the green vine was in her black hair, and she had a large bouquet of the violets in her hand, nearly the color of her eyes. The dress was cut low to a point in front and behind, showing the superb poise of her small head upon her neck. Whoever had sent her flowers must have known what her dress was to be, or he could not have sent her the violets to match.

When Vane left, he had made an appointment for a walk the next fine afternoon. She had said nothing about the handkerchief. Vane feared, every morning, to find the parcel containing it at his rooms, but it was not sent back. He was encouraged by this, and began to make excuses to himself for her being at the theatre. This still gave him much anxiety, and he half decided that he would speak to her about it.

At last there came a fine day for the walk, and Vane called at her house at four. He had also called one day before, but she had complained that it was too cloudy and looked like rain. This day he found her ready. They went up Fifth Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street; then he persuaded her to go into the park. She fascinated him that afternoon. There was something peculiarly feminine about Miss Thomas. Although her hair was black, it was not coarse and lustrous, but very fine and soft, dead black in color. A soft, creamy dress hung lovingly about her figure. She talked much about herself in a sisterly sort of way. Vane felt a desire to protect her. She had a gentle way of yielding, of trusting to him, of allowing him to persuade her to continue the walk. They sat down a moment on a wooden bench among some seringa-bushes; above them were the branches of an oak just leafing out, swaying in the wind and casting changing flecks of light and shade upon the gravel path and the folds of her gown. There were soft lights in her face, and her eyes were like two blue gentians.

“Miss Thomas, I have a question to ask you,” began Vane, suddenly. “You will promise not to be offended?”

“Yes,” said she innocently, opening her eyes wider.

“Are you engaged to be married?”

“No,” said she almost instantly, as if without reflecting. Then she blushed violently, and silently rose to go home.