II

Ralph was afterwards to make sure that he had heard Mrs. Midmore's voice

before he saw her face, and that his young friend must accordingly so

have detained him as that the new mistress of the scene enjoyed the

fullest exhibition to sight of what her daughter announced to hearing.

"Well I'm sure then I'm ready to receive it too when you've both had

enough of it!"--this high clear tone fell on our young man's ear and

constituted at a stroke, without the aid of his in the least otherwise

taking her in, his first impression of Mrs. Midmore. It was anything but

the voice of alarm, and yet was as fine as a knife-edge for cutting

straight into his act of union with the girl. Never had he heard a human

sound so firm at once and so friendly, so rich in itself and so

beautiful, and at the same time raising so the question of whom it could

be used by and what presence it denoted. He was of course informed of

these matters the next instant or as soon as he could turn in the

disengaged way. But the few seconds had already sufficed; they gave him

as nothing previous had done the note and measure of the close social

order into which he had plunged, so that in facing his proper hostess he

had already winced as at the chill of a tremendous admonition. Molly,

during his passage with her, had, whether wittingly or no, left him

unwarned and unscared; but the fashion after which her fine smiling

parent both made good the fairest predictions and threatened instant

confusion was as great a puzzle as, with time for it, a rash gentleman

could have wished to handle. There she was, the very finest woman of her

age possible, as Miss Midmore, for comparison, was the very finest of

hers, but all to the instant effect of having made him just by her few

words say to himself that he had never in all his days before so much as

heard personal speech, and wonder in consequence what such a speaker

would make of his own. The marvel was for the moment that with her

handsome hard face brightened up for him not less clearly than a badge

of importance, on occasion laid by, is judiciously polished for wearing,

she should expose her sensibility, or in other words her social surface,

to what his native expression might have at the best to treat it to. The

marvel was indeed that, borrowing as she did he could scarce have said

what air of authority, verily of high female office, from her

rich-looking black attire, she determined in him even before he had

spoken an inward gasp of confession. "I'm a rank barbarian, yes: she

must, oh she _must_, take me for that!"--he put this to himself at that

instant with a kind of plea for his greater ease. It came to him that

since he couldn't possibly succeed with her as a fine gentleman--even

though, so oddly, he appeared to have succeeded as such with her

daughter--his advantage would be in some quite other wild grace, on

which therefore he must desperately throw himself.

However, she was herself an apparition of such force that the question

of his own luck missed application and he but stared at her lost, and

yet again lost, in that reflection that yes, absolutely yes, no approach

to such a quality of tone as she dealt in had ever in his own country

greeted his ear. Yes, again and yet again, it spoke of ten thousand

things that he could guess at now in her presence, and that he had even

dreamed of, beforehand, through faint echoes and in other stray lights;

things he could see she didn't in the least think of at the moment

either, all possessed as she was with the allowance she had in her

hospitality already made for him. Every fact of her appearance

contributed somehow to this grand and generous air, the

something-or-other suggesting to him that he had never yet seen manner

at home at that pitch, any more than he had veritably heard utterance.

When or where, in any case, had his eye, alert as he might feel it

naturally was, been caught by such happy pomp as that of the disposed

dark veil or mantilla which, attached to her head, framed in hoodlike

looseness this seat of her high character and, gathering about her

shoulders, crossed itself as a pair of long ends that depended in

lacelike fashion almost to her feet? He had apprehended after a few more

seconds that here was "costume" beheld of him in the very fact and

giving him by its effect all the joy of recognition--since he had

hitherto had but to suppose and conceive it, though without being in the

effort, as his own person might testify, too awkwardly far out. Yes,

take him for what she would, she might see that he too was

dressed--which tempered his barbarism perhaps only too much and referred

itself back at all events, he might surely pretend, to a prime and after

all not uncommendable intuition of the matter. If he had always been, as

he would have allowed, overdressed for New York, where this was a

distinct injury to character and credit, business credit at least, which

he had none the less braved, so he had already found he was no more than

quite right for London, and for Mansfield Square in especial; though at

the same time he didn't aspire, and wouldn't for the world, to

correspond with such hints as Mrs. Midmore threw off. She threw it off

to a mere glance that she represented by the aid of dress the absolute

value and use of presence as presence, apart from any other office--a

pretension unencountered in that experience of his own which he had yet

up to now tended to figure as lively. Absolutely again, as he could

recover, he had never understood presence without use to play a

recognised part; which would but come back indeed to the question of

what use--great ambiguous question-begging term!--might on occasion

consist of. He was not to go into that for some time yet, but even on

the spot it none the less shone at him for the instant that he was

apparently now to see ornament itself frankly recognised as use; and not

only that, but boldly contented, unassailably satisfied, with a

vagueness so portentous--which it somehow gave a promise to his very

eyes of the moment that he should find convincingly asserted and

extended. All this conspired toward offering him in this wondrous lady a

figure that made ladies hitherto displayed to him, and among whom had

been several beauties, though doubtless none so great as splendid Molly,

lose at a stroke their lustre for memory, positively vitiated as they

thus seemed by the obscurity, not to say the flat humility, of their

employed and applied and their proportionately admired state.

We hasten to concede of course that Ralph entered in those few instants

but into imperfect possession of the excited sense, the glimpse of more

and more great things, provoked for him by his elder kinswoman's

resonant arrival; yet it's no extravagance to say that the knowledge

Molly had been teaching him he was already master of took a measureless

bound with the act of his just kissing Mrs. Midmore's hand. She let him

do this as a first sequel to her remark on her daughter's description of

their commerce, but his own next consciousness was that of being kissed

by her on both cheeks--he could scarce have said whether more freely or

more nobly: the first sequel would have been poor without the second,

she struck him as having at once admonished him, leaving on his hands

his quick conception of how he should act with true elegance, the style

of behaviour on which she would generally speaking most reckon. He had

never before kissed a lady's hand, nor seen one kissed, save in a

stage-play; also the way he did it would stamp him the barbarian she had

disposed him, under the rush of his perceptions, to seek his best safety

in proving himself: yet it was to become at the end of a minute a

consequence of these things that he felt to the full how soundly Molly

had answered for his freedom to fear nothing. This he so succeeded in

achieving by the aid of the ladies conjoined that he could scarce have

said when it was that his relation with the elder, now admirably sealed,

had fitted him to distinctness with a fresh pair of wings and showed him

there was no length to which they mightn't bear him. How had this fond

presumption grown, he might afterwards have wondered, unless by just

listening to her voice of voices?--her beautiful bold tone simply

leading the way, as he subsequently made the matter out, and his ear,

all but irrespective of its sense, holding and holding it, indifferent

for the hour to what it meant, and yet withal informed, by its mere

pitch and quality, of numberless things that were to guard him against

possible mistakes, very much as he had been guarded during his passage

with Molly. Numberless things, yes; so many that he was afterwards to

see how he owed all those he could feel most at his ease about to this

extraordinarily fortifying hour. He might afterwards make out that it

had been fortifying, at least in part, because it had been so

flattering: he soon ceased to care that he was after all apparently not

able to pass for a barbarian--his connection with the secure world, that

of manners and of every sort of cross-reference, that of the right tone

and the clear tradition, had been settled at every point at which

equivocation would otherwise have waited. If it wasn't flattering that

two such women should have made him by a turn of the hand their very own

and have opened out to him, without a shade of reserve that he could

catch in the fact, every privilege thereunto attached, there was no

sense in the great mystifying term, as he had always found it, which

resembled the custom of hand-kissing in that he had hitherto known it

but by name. To taste of the sweet was to feel sure he had gone to this

hour without it, just as on his side he had never helped another to

it--no, not in the least after the fashion according to which he had let

his present companions, and Mrs. Midmore of course in especial, hand it

forth as in a deep-bowled silver spoon.

What overtook him further withal, a few moments later, was that if he

shouldn't be able to keep it down the measure of his new luxury might so

keep itself up as to overstrain all their powers, his own stomach for it

not least: the near danger of this topple seemed in fact presented to

him as soon as a third member of the family had been admitted by the

door of Mrs. Midmore's entrance--the servant who had waited on his own

now passing in again as if to clear the approach and make another

announcement. The footman in effect said nothing, or nothing at least

was heard by Ralph, who was struck at once with this young man's almost

wild sidelong stare at him, a positively droll departure from the strict

servile propriety the fellow seemed otherwise formed to express, and

with the way the gentleman so ushered in pulled up before a bolder

approach and stood testifying, as might have seemed, to a form of

apprehension scarce more happily controlled. The fresh apparition, it

was easy to see, could be but a Midmore of Midmores; which was doubtless

in great part why his arrest, his frightened bulging eyes, his immediate

failure of assurance, where assurance, by Ralph's conception, would so

have consorted, represented the honest tribute of a person hugely

impressed. Our own young man's high accessibility to impressions on his

side, and all, however quickly multiplied, kept separate in spite of

their number, showed him during the minute that ensued quite

half-a-dozen different things of the first importance--such as that Mrs.

Midmore must promptly have spoken, must have said something like "Oh

Perry dear, don't hang back; come and bid our great cousin welcome!"

such as that, for all the pitch of her flattery, as the scene fairly

flushed with it, she didn't like her son quite so artlessly to gape,

preferring, for herself, more intention and thereby, as it were, more

profit; such as that, at the same time, Perry Midmore, whose name of

Peregrine our remarkable friend immediately fixed on him, had quite

other signs than those of general, of easy or precipitate deference.

Short and sturdy, stocky, as Ralph, reproducing the image, might have

described him, he was so stout and direct an assertion of ready brute

force that his air of misgiving, his confession of shyness, his

discountenanced first looks at the possible adversary awaiting him

might, on the ground of any comparison of matter with mind, quite have

gone to that adversary's head. Tight in his clothes, especially in the

buckskin breeches which his riding-boots surmounted almost to the knee

and his stout legs exposed to a strain; tight in his vividly blue coat,

which had a tail but no skirts, though indeed brass buttons galore, as

if to make up for that, and which suggested at the wrists, under the

arms and across the chest, that he might fairly have outgrown it through

daily increase of strength; tight even in the redundant neckcloth that

couldn't well have strangled him, and yet above which his young face and

the large fold of his chin, in particular, declared themselves purple

and congested--carrying out also, with the fine bright sheen of the

skin, that betrayal as of a general tense surface and of the effect of

breathing hard beneath it. Ralph was afterwards thoroughly to learn both

how far the fortitude of this nominal young head of the house of Midmore

could go and where and why it would fail; but the immediate exhibition

was that of an extraordinary diffidence, almost a chill of fear, in face

of the unusual. This let our friend see, out of hand, how new and how

strange he must have struck his kinsman as being, in spite of such

preparations as must already have worked for him; which fact it

was--just the primitive candour of Perry's revelation--that most

impressed on him his fine liability to loom large.

It wouldn't be a great affair, certainly, to loom large to Perry--that

he at once grasped; for while he felt himself thus play on his

sensibility he felt sure that all there might be of that article,

absolutely all, was engaged, with nothing left over for any other

use--though this apprehension, at the same time, clothed the odd figure

with a richer interest perhaps than any yet stirring in his breast.

Perry would be bold, Perry would be brave, would be even, and with the

last unconsciousness, brutal; and withal for those lapsing moments Perry

would have given anything not to have to deal with a presence that

deprived him at a stroke of those of his advantages, as he knew these,

that had accompanied him up to the very door. Ralph felt in the full

measure of this perception the desire he should keep them, and for the

very fullest exhibition; which he would be hanged if he didn't

positively _make_ him do--so that to begin this effect on the spot he

smiled and smiled, smiled verily as perhaps never in his life before,

and alas but at first with the apparent consequence of inspiring more

mistrust. It was probably at this instant that there fell upon our

friend the first light sense of a predicament on his own part the

gravity of which he was before long not to mistake--the faintest

symptomatic hint, that is, of a dilemma so extraordinary that we shall

scarcely be able to do it justice enough, consisting as it did in the

prevision of his probable failure to keep himself unperturbed, in the

right proportion, by the mistrust it was open to him, on a certain side,

or at least in certain quarters, to inspire. Why should he, why should

he? he was to be able to say to himself, though indeed after much else

had happened, that he had then inwardly and rather sickishly begun to

inquire; for in the least degree to determine wonderments that should be

beyond answering was the last thing he had dreamed of, and we may in

fact all but feel his heart even now stand still for half a second under

that noted first breath of a fear. That he wanted but to please and

soothe and satisfy him, that he was ready to sacrifice to so doing all

but the blood of his veins, this came over him to the point of bringing

out sweat-drops on his brow while he met his kinsman's bulging eyes with

the grace of reassurance we have just imputed to his own. He understood,

he understood--which was the challenging interest: Perry scented his

cleverness, so to call it, scented his very act of understanding, as

some creature of the woods might scent the bait of the trapper; whereby

it was that to prosecute success by wiles more manifest yet and then but

watch them brilliantly fail might well mean at last finding no issue in

a case that depended on issues. Was this perfect example of whatever he

should really prove--his absolute transparency making him preciously

perfect--going to defeat by mere alarm the true, the extreme felicity of

a right relation with him? that relation which would consist of seeing

how he was shut up to his three or four parts as to the rooms of a house

of three or four windows and only a bolted door, and attending him there

with the due allowance for this. The point would be in the young man's

dim perception and possible resentment of allowances--conceivably

productive in him of positive unrest; thanks, no less conceivably, to

his being probably as neat a case as one could desire of impenetrable

density before the unfamiliar. The unknown, however presented to him,

would remain for him the unknowable, and by just so much the detestable

and the impossible, calling on quasi-brutish instincts of danger and

self-defence. The danger would be to the element of pride in him, one of

the three or four properties that a Midmore had easily at hand, and that

could quite naturally make the embodiment of such a privilege recognise

whatever might menace it, even though with no resource or comfort in the

matter but a dull direct hate, a straight if unpolished arm.

To divine these things, however, was also, while one was about it, to

divine the presence, lurking among them, of the question of calculable

profit, the power, elementary enough, to compare inconveniences and

choose the least--the greatest being of course the one that would most

interfere with such a gentleman's material ease. It was solid, it had

always been, to be a Midmore of Drydown--that pressed heavier upon Ralph

each instant; but the virtue of the solid was exactly that you couldn't

see through it, as you might, or as unmannerly people at least, looking

hard at it, might, should financial inanition begin to make it at all

thin. Horrid for the great--since, strangely enough, the young man,

staring, lowering, vainly dissimulating, or at least ineffectually

pretending, did in his way represent greatness--to have to feel less at

home in the world, or certainly in Mansfield Square, let alone at

Drydown itself, by the want of anything their quality had learned from

such a good way back to take for granted. Our friend vibrated to the

sense of still another tenth of a second during which the measure of the

want he himself was to supply made him blink as by its intense flash,

directly after which he knew that his gallantry of welcome to Perry, his

smile of intelligence--he might fairly have damned the intelligence he

couldn't keep down!--was practically a suggestion that his cousin should

advance and receive his promise to pay. His cousin did advance, at the

worst, more rapidly than any effective alarm of Ralph's on this score

could supervene; and then the latter scarce knew what brave distance had

been covered by the exchange between them of a fine old fraternal

embrace over which Mrs. Midmore's authority, dominant really, after all,

through everything, had somehow presided with elegance and yet without

ceremony.

Was it the fact of the embrace, was it the common stout palpability, the

very human homely odour, of his relative, that had at the end of a

minute dispelled all difficulties and renewed the wonderful rush, as it

could only be felt, of the current? Certain it was that if Perry was

going to be curious, and this most perhaps by the repudiation in him of

the very rudiments of curiosity, so at the same time he had become as a

creature to play with--from the moment at least of one's having

something to his advantage to dangle before him. His human simplicity

would surely mark itself as unlike, as quite beyond, anything of the

sort that had ever confronted Ralph with pretensions or assumptions; and

how should that alone not prove tempting to one's taste for a game,

exasperated as this taste might become by such particular stupidities of

confidence and comfort as would inevitably await it? It might be indeed

that one had never seen the straight force of stupidity so

attested--that straight force being, when applied, nothing very much

other than brutality; which, clearly, lurked here with supports and

accessories and surrounding graces, the fair and delicate house, the

full-voiced mannerly women, the ordered consideration of twenty kinds,

that it was so far from being able to draw upon in a country where it

was mainly known but by its going naked and unashamed. Ralph easily knew

that the attempt to preserve itself there in whatever approach to the

conditions now before him would have had overmuch to reckon with

distraction and diversion. All of which wondrous interpretation, on his

part, of the few trifles light as air that achieved in as few seconds

such a brushing of his sense, left him momentarily with a tight hold of

Perry's hand and an ear still reached by his hard breathing--this too

though the return to their orbits of his silly scared eyes was more

assured.

Ralph further knew a desire to mark the distinction between being

satisfied of him and amused at him, and was aware above all of something

sharper for the instant than aught else, the fixed and extreme attention

of the others, the look of the two ladies at their son and brother as if

under stress of what they might gain or lose by the sentiment he should

provoke; their major care for _that_, in the connection, rather than for

their visitor's own immediate action, enriching again in our young man

the savour of success. It was as Molly's husband to be, who had just

arrived from America to claim her hand, and who had in fact just claimed

it and felt it brightly conferred, along with a fond mother's blessing,

by the grand girl herself--it was under instruction to greet him in this

character that he knew Perry to have been pushed into his arms; and what

with the lapse of the next minute had come to hang in the balance was

whether or no that youth, the head of the family but also the fool of

it, and with some rude art of his own the will of it, would stand out

for his right not to have been passed over by the offhand transaction.

He was a gentleman to stand out for his rights up to any point at which

he shouldn't get bewildered about them; for he was also a gentleman to

get bewildered, that is easily to be determined in such a sense, on any

ground not absolutely to be felt by the shuffle of his feet. In saying

to him with fine gaiety "I want to commend myself all round, and quite

understand that I must before the last word is said--so that you must

give me time for it a bit, please:" in saying, in risking, he verily

felt, as much as this he would have been conscious of more felicity had

he not seen the very next instant that gaiety might well be too fine to

please in the difficult relation; to which it would thus appear that his

kinsman could only contribute in highest measure a mistrust of any

semblance of manner, or at least of such manner as a glib adventurer

from overseas might have brought with him. He was probably formed not to

"like" manner, or to understand it, whether kept up or kept down, damn

him; for if Ralph, with his own splendid sense for rising again to the

surface after deep submersions, could take the quickest conceivable note

of this, so there hung in his eye at the same time the lively truth,

which fairly jerked out arms and legs like those of a toy harlequin

worked by a string, that manner was essentially and by an extraordinary

law to be his constant resort and weapon and of consistent application

to every aspect of his case. It wouldn't of course always be the same,

nor would he wish it to, since that would represent the really mad

grimace; but the vision of it was precious in proportion as he felt how,

so remarkably, in fact so unaccountably, he should need always to work

from _behind_ something--something that, look as it would, he must

object to Perry's staring at in return as if it were a counterfeit coin

or a card from up his sleeve.

Let us frankly plead, for that matter, that he found himself affected

before this passage lapsed as by the suddenest vision of a possibility

of his having to appeal from the imputation, as who should say, of

cheating, cheating in that sense which his above-mentioned love of the

game, exactly, might expose him to suspicion of; this for all the world

as if he were seated with the house of Midmore, not to speak of other

company too, at a green table and between tall brave candlesticks which

would at a given moment somehow perversely light the exchange of queer

glances from partner to partner at his expense. So odd an apprehension

could cast of course but the briefest shade: breath after breath and

hint after hint--though whence directed who should say?--so spending

themselves upon the surface of his sensibility that impressions, as we

have already seen, were successively effaced and nothing persisted but

the force of derived motion. As soon as he had heard his affianced

bride, for instance, take up with infinite spirit the words of

accommodation just addressed by him to her brother he seemed to see a

shining clearance and to measure the span by which the three of them

together, he and she and her mother, would be cleverer than any home

criticism. "What puts it into your head, please, that if I'm quite

content, and bold enough into the bargain to say as much to whomever it

may concern, what puts it into your head that he may have a case against

you that need give you the least trouble?" She spoke that out like her

mother's daughter, whether like her brother's sister or no, blooming

with still greater beauty and so attracting and holding Perry's eyes in

consequence that when he turned them back again they reflected something

of her pride.

"There's not a gentleman too grand for her anywhere," her brother

observed to Ralph; "but I suppose you think yourself quite one of

ourselves; which I don't say you're not," he added with due caution, "if

you really please her and please my mother, to say nothing----"

"To say nothing of my pleasing you, of course"--Ralph took him up with

the address that, however it might turn, he would so assuredly have to

make the best of. "Yes, that's of course, but I won't pretend I don't

draw a great confidence from their favour: I've felt them on the spot

just as wise as they are kind. Just as kind as they are handsome too,"

he went on, looking at his kinsman ever so much harder and harder--which

he somehow found that, though it wasn't at all what he wanted, he

couldn't in the least help. It made him drive his address home, and this

was, in the oddest way, as if he had his host by the body in a sort of

intimate combat and were trying him and squeezing him for a fall. Perry

would have to _take_ him, and to show that he had taken him--this was

the tug; only the more he conveyed that, even if he wreathed it, so to

say, in flowers and the more he thereby insisted on a relation, if not

on the one, the more he seemed to give his man an opportunity the other

aspect of which was that it was for himself a form of exposure. Why he

should be exposed, and what, above all, exposed to, was more than he

could have said--wondering as he did at this even while a passion urged

and an instinct warned him. There it was, in any case: he couldn't help

_sounding_ Perry, even in the presence of the women; which was what

brought upon him, through concentration of the visual sense, the

challenge he seemed positively to advance into the enemy's county in

order to invite. It was the rate at which he drew intelligence out of

the dull that made him uneasy when it ought to have made him, by every

presumption, feel it as wind in his sails. Violating nature, as might

fairly seem, in the face before him, what was such a glimmer

intelligence _of?_--this he asked himself while he watched it grow and

while, into the bargain, he might have marvelled at the oddity of one's

wanting to be impressive without wanting to be understood. To be

understood simply as impressive--it was this that would best consort;

but what the devil wouldn't requiring such a creature to be more

penetrable perhaps represent in the way of teaching it tricks it might

use against one? In the act of impressing, Ralph felt, he encouraged

familiarity--which was what people had been known to do at their cost

and to the provocation of bad accident by putting primitive natures in a

false position. False indeed would be the position when Perry should

begin, say, to know more about Ralph Pendrel than this lover of life

knew about himself. It may be added that if these considerations did

lurk in the expression of countenance bent by Ralph upon his host with

general ingenious intent, even a Midmore stuffed with a single prejudice

might well have picked from the bunch some hint of a sinister menace to

that monotony.

"You don't mean to say you're struck with _my_ appearance--I know it's

not my strong point!" Perry said goodhumouredly enough, after all, and

with a laugh which put that quantity at once in a better light. "But I

like, as much as you please, to be praised for what I _am_" he

added--"if you'll give me time to show that; for I suppose you've

already noticed that in this country we _take_ time for our affairs, and

perhaps no people among us all more than we of this family; which has

gone on for ever so long, yon know, at its own pace and never allowed

itself to be driven. We probably don't _look_ to you, however, as if you

could lash us up--out of breath even as you may perhaps be with your

errand; and that's all the appearance I pretend to make to anyone. What

I leave to my mother I do leave to her," the young man further

declared--more and more articulate, clearly, on finding himself so well

listened to; "and of course she and Miss Midmore are as clever as

they're handsome, if that's what you want." After achieving, with some

unexpectedness for Ralph, this effort of propriety, he looked as in

recovered self-possession from Mrs. Midmore to Molly, and then again

very hard at his sister and back at his mother, so that it shouldn't be

his fault, obviously, if they didn't trust his tact. He showed himself

in short the man of sense and of consequence, though while speaking he

had stared straight before him, not resting his eyes on Ralph, who, none

the less, at once and cordially welcomed his remarks.

"I hear you with the greatest interest, but even if we don't always take

time enough in America for what we do, I'm not going to grant you that

I haven't thoroughly thought of what I'm about in coming to you. And if

you care to know it," Ralph continued, "it has taken but four days of

old England to convince me that you're the happiest people in the most

convenient country. I've been since I landed more pleased and amused

than I can tell you." With which our young man again smiled and smiled.

"Oh you've seen nothing as yet compared to what you will," Mrs. Midmore

impatiently broke in--"and I know," she said, "that what Perry would

like to say to you is that you'll have no idea of anything till you've

seen and admired Drydown. That you shall do in good time--it's a place I

shall make it _my_ care that you shall get to love, for that's where

we're at home, where we're _what_ we are, if you understand; and where,

as I see Perry desires to assure you, you shall have a horse of your own

to ride, and the best home-grown victual that you'll anywhere find to

eat, and a capital neighbourhood to receive civility from, to say

nothing of one of the very finest views in England spread out before

you."

"You shall have any horse that you can ride," Perry concurred, his clue

to amiability now quite grasped, with this fine example of it given;

"though it isn't when they're most to my taste, I grant, that they're

apt to be most to other men's. That's what I say to my friends"--and he

improved his theme, not to speak of his himself improving with it: "I

tell 'em they're welcome to any mount that suits 'em, and I don't think

I find it in general a freedom from which my animals suffer. Unless it

be," he pursued, appealing again with his flushed but comparatively

directed deliberation to his sister, "unless it be that I provide better

still for Molly's liking--since I must make him understand, you know,"

he kept on, "how straight he has to follow if he's so bold as to allow

you a lead."

"I'm sure I hope he'll be bold enough to ride with his wife!" the girl

splendidly laughed--"or, if you think I put it too forwardly, with a

young lady whom he has in half an hour inspired with such kindness that

she wouldn't for the world do him a mite of harm." There was that in her

free archness which struck again for Ralph the note of he could scarce

have said what old-time breadth of the pleasant address and the frolic

challenge; so that, sounded out in this way before the others, it made

him pant a little as if he were in fact engaged in "following" and

needed all his effort not to be left behind. He felt in comparison,

before such a force of freshness, almost disembodied, and didn't know

for a moment what he mightn't have said if she hadn't, still lighting

the way for him with her great confident eyes, seemed to wish to give

him all sorts of assurance in the single charge: "You're not to be

afraid, you're not to be afraid----!"

"I hope to heaven I shan't let you see it if I am!" he interrupted. "And

you and your brother must remember at any rate that though the natives

of Mexico and Peru, when first discovered by the Spaniards, had never

seen a horse and thought them very terrible, we have long ago got over

that in our part of the country, and indeed, I think, are not much in

fear of anything or anyone--unless it be perhaps of finer ladies than

our simple society and our homely manners have yet taught us to deal

with. I pray the powers," he went on to his kinsman, for whom once more,

despite his desire to the contrary, he felt himself "figure" all too

unavoidably and confoundingly, "I pray the powers I mayn't want either

for wit or for any other sort of coolness when it's a question of your

fine gentlemen--by which I mean of my enjoying their notice and letting

them not doubt of mine. But of course my very errand shows you how

marked I am for the full ravage of female loveliness and for the

advantage that it gains from the perfect gentility waiting upon it among

you here. It must clearly do what it will with me, you see, and if the

best it can do is likely to be to kill me why I'll at least go merrily

to my death."

Perry Midmore, listening to this, kept his face half averted, but his

eye was now more judiciously watchful and he turned it askance in his

attention. He would weigh things and be wise--they might help to make

him so, when his visitor uttered them, if they couldn't always make him

ready; all of which inward comment the visitor had again the vexed

consciousness of not being able to keep him from suspecting. He had

taught him within five minutes that there was, that there could be, such

a thing, and its pointing itself at him, whatever its sense, was the new

and the disquieting fact. Ralph laid a hand on his shoulder with a

singular sudden impulse to prove that even if one's thought was at play,

since this was on occasion of the perverse nature of thought, the

letting it take its full course would really bring it round to a point,

in fact to a succession of points, where another would recognise it as

positively working for him; and the gesture did after an instant so far

operate as that the other's queer little glare abated and he stood as

stiffly passive as if, whatever this should mean, the least movement

might perhaps precipitate some further complication.

Mrs. Midmore meanwhile, Ralph saw, had so completely measured his own

bright promise that, quite at her ease about it, her anxiety was all for

her son's somehow interfering with the prospect; which she at the same

time mightn't be able to take him up upon by reason of something

divinably new and strange, something perhaps even beyond his usual show

of shyness and that provoked wonder at the cause of it. Ralph had in

fact in this connection another of his sublime instants, as we may

fairly call them, with this particular one possibly the most

sublime--since her next motion, though but a momentary look at him, of

the supremely searchingest, played straight out of her desire to side

with him, as it were, against any hindrance to a right understanding and

a convenient, an elegant smoothness that her boy should stupidly offer.

Wasn't there in her face during the moment a dim glimmer of

inquiry?--something like "What on earth _is_ it, yes, that you're doing

to him, what was it, yes, a few minutes ago, when if I hadn't been

watching him he would have shuddered like a frightened horse who sniffs

in the air the nearness of some creature of a sort he has never seen?"

The whole mother would have been in that, Ralph was afterwards to make

out, the mother deeply engaged for her daughter's benefit and pleasure,

as well as for anything to the advantage of the race in general that

could be picked up by a sufficiently dignified long arm, and at the same

time so rich in instincts that had for their centre the prior

consequence of the head of the house, that she could almost know alarm

in the midst of jubilation, and at any rate seemed to turn upon the hero

of the occasion, for the five seconds, the chill of a special quite

tremendous suggestion. She wanted right resolutely to like and to

further him--it would be so good for them all, and if he was destined in

any degree to counter this it wouldn't be by an effect upon her directly

produced, but literally through her fond attention to Perry and even

should that attention amount to impatience of Perry's attitude. He would

but have to show personal fear, so to call it, or perhaps to do no more

than show that he was afraid in advance of knowing it, for that question

of what might be the matter with him to lead to the other and the finer.

Such might be taken then as the way in which the last wonder about the

American cousin would doubtless usher itself in. It was, however, so far

from having yet won an inch of the ground, or having indeed really

foreshadowed its power to do this, that all Ralph knew, to the effect of

joy, within the minute, was that she was just putting Perry as right as

possible again by the renewed wealth of her tone.

"Don't turn it upon us that we take you for a savage," she laughed to

her visitor, "when you talk about killing and dying among us as if we

were Red Men on the war-path! If we're going to kill and eat you at any

rate--isn't that what your cannibals do?--we shall at least fatten you

first for the table, and you needn't fear but that you'll enjoy that as

much as you may suppose us to enjoy, as good judges, the next stage of

the affair. I'm an excellent judge myself, please believe, and I shall

decline to have you despatched before you're in perfect condition.

Meanwhile therefore," she nobly continued, "we shall live upon you in

_this_ pleasant way--and with Molly's good right to be helped to you

first, always first, entirety understood by us. The only thing is that

I'm not sure we're quite eager to share you at once with a hundred other

people."

Perry it was, rather remarkably, who spoke in answer to these fine words

before Ralph had time to meet them--obliged as the latter always was,

after all, to select a little among the resources of his wit. "Shan't

you have a good bit to share him with my sister Nan at least?--_you_, I

mean," he said to his mother, his hands in his pockets now and with the

effect from it of a hunch up of his shoulders which at once established

somehow his air of more conscious intention. "I don't say it for Molly,

of whom I shouldn't expect it, and who of course will tear her sister's

eyes out if Nan takes too much for granted. But you're kinder to Nan

than Molly is," he continued--"and it's I," he still went on, with a

turn now to their visitor, "it's I, among the three of us, that she can

look to most. Oh yes," he persisted as for the benefit of the ladies,

"you want him to know all about it, so I'm just telling him, don't you

see? And it's what you yourself want to know, I take it, cousin--though

I don't doubt of you as one for finding out."

He had grown of a sudden extraordinarily more assured, and Ralph, quite

directly faced by him with it, felt at once how the interest of him was

quickened. Catching the air of their faces he could note as well that

Mrs. Midmore and Molly were not differently affected; which

perception--and the two women exchanged at the moment a pair of quite

confirmatory glances--renewed his sense that something unprecedented had

within the ten minutes happened to Perry, and was indeed continuing to

happen, just as he himself continued to have to recognise that he was,

no comfort of responsibility, the author of it. Not only was this there,

moreover, to strain further than would have in advance seemed possible

the all-engaging smile into which he kept falling back for refuge, but

it was also salient in the scene that however one might interpret such

an exhibited phenomenon the character showing it was himself getting

used to it; so that what had in truth most acutely taken place was that

the worthy in question had of a sudden almost jumped to a vision of not

suffering, or at any rate of not losing, by it. Whatever it might be, in

fine, there was something to be done with it--as for instance that he

should thrust it straight at Ralph in this account of embarrassing

matters. Wasn't the point that he would make them embarrassing, damn

him, if he could, and that, detected by his mother and sister, he was at

the very stroke of trying it on? If the ladies would help the

embarrassment not to act, Ralph inwardly remarked, the case would still

have more of amusement than anything else to give out; only--_there_ was

the betrayal he seemed to catch--they might, for all one knew, presently

find themselves not able to: which was perhaps exactly what had been

meant by that tacit communication between them. "Nan is at Dry down,

where I left her yesterday," Perry meanwhile went on to mention, "and

would have liked beyond anything in life coming up to pay you her

respects. But if you notice her delay in waiting on you my mother will

explain with pleasure how many obligations she has at home--though I'll

be hanged if I believe in them enough, ma'am, not to be sorry I didn't

bring her to town, even if I had to put her up behind me on Rouser.

She's not a girl who either mopes or rebels," he added for Ralph's

benefit before his mother, taken by surprise, could meet these sudden

freedoms; "but no more is she a household drudge or a mere milkmaid, and

you're not to think that if she's kept at a distance it's because she's

not fit to be seen. She's not a great toast like Molly, but she's much

handsomer than I am, don't you think, ma'am?"--and with this he fairly

advanced upon his mother, who still more markedly flushed at the style

of his address. "If our cousin's to make our fortune," he wound up, "let

him see as soon as possible how many he'll have to provide for."

"You've broken out into such cleverness, my lad, that you should

certainly now be trusted to make your own!" Mrs. Midmore returned, the

brightness of her dignity suffering a little, Ralph could see, yet being

put to no great pains to carry itself off as untouched. "Should you wish

to see poor Nan at once," she remarked to her visitor, "we can easily

send for her by the coach, and then you can judge of what she costs me

at least to keep!"

"Why don't you rather propose that he shall take the coach himself if

it's such a cruelty to them to wait?" Molly asked of her mother, but

rolling her fine eyes at Ralph in a manner that helped for the moment to

make him feel more astray than any challenge to his perception had yet

succeeded in doing. "So near a relation needn't fear any gossip, so that

if you pay her a visit there it isn't I, sir," she laughed, "who shall

feel a penny the worse. What in the world should my little sister be but

his little sister too?--making it a new big brother, for herself, who

may strike her indeed as a better fortune, not to call it even a better

brother, than any she now can boast of. If you really want to go at

once," she kept on to Ralph, and dropping him the smartest curtsey with

it, "I'll trust you to come back to me in time--in time to marry me, I

mean," she cried; "and I don't mind telling you that if you shouldn't

I'd make no scruple of going to bring you. Nan is the nicest little

body, and, with the gardener's wife to help, would make you, I think,

comfortable enough."

On which extravagant dazzle of pleasantries she paused a moment, Ralph

feeling the while that their being to such a tune mutually and, as he

might have put it, crudely astare signified something that had not as

yet come up between them. Oh they had been making and taking a

prodigious amount of affectionate assurance, but didn't Ralph know on

the spot, hadn't he in fact been advised for the last three minutes,

that here was matter of intimacy beyond any token they had exchanged and

a different sort of business altogether from even the sharpest need yet

resting on him to patch up a sense? There had been none he didn't patch

up with that effect as of a quick bright triumph over difficulty--so

that we have repeatedly seen how the challenge to his awareness, when

pressed, set that awareness on its feet in time, never failing after

this fashion to save his confidence. What had now taken place was that

unexpectedly his need seemed to betray instead of helping him: every

blest reference save the present had in other words found him ready--and

not just ready to show he knew, but ready quite to know; only this

question of an identity thrust at him to which he couldn't rise and

which didn't, like all the others, breathe on him after an instant the

secret of the means of rising, only this one left him to direct at Molly

(which came indeed to saying at their companions too) a smile which

would turn really to sickness should it have to last but a moment

longer. Stranger than anything yet for our young man was what now

occurred: his getting as in the glimmer of a flash the measure of the

wonders he had achieved, and getting it through this chill of the

facility stayed. What made it a chill was the felt danger, drawn from

her look, of Molly's speaking his case out at him before he could

prevent her. "Why you don't know, truly you don't know, therefore what

are you talking about?"--that was in her face or was on the point of

being, and the great pang was that he minded it himself still more than

she and the others certainly would if they should fairly detect it. He

_didn't_ know, he hadn't known, and he wasn't going to or it would have

come by this time: there wasn't in him the first faint possibility of an

"Oh yes, your sister Nan of course, who is of such-and-such an age and

such-and-such a figure and such-and-such a connection with the grand

image of you that we've had at home!" There was no grand image, nor even

any scantest, of a nice little body, as Molly had put it, lurking in the

family background and as to whom, by the same magic of wanting to enough

which had constantly served him, he could be sure he was passably

provided. The possibility of sickness was in the fall from such a proved

independence of the baseness, as who should say, of pretending. Two or

three times, yes, it might have appeared he should have to pretend, some

gap in his inspiration remaining too distinctly unbridged; but with that

villainy _always_ averted--since positively it wore the villain's

face--by its having become in the very nick the mere mistake of his

fear. He had thus again and again escaped being too superficial, and

with this gain of certitude of how little he was there to be so at all

had come each time the sense of luxury in his renewals of recognition.

That there would be no luxury in not recognising, his failure of vision

in respect to a second daughter of the house instantly taught him, but

even while it did so no repair of the lapse arrived.

What Molly saw, and what in ten seconds more she would make the others

see, was the fact of the lapse unrelieved--the queerness of which for

her was indeed already out with her asking him what was the matter and

why in the world he looked at the mention of the dear thing at Drydown

as if he were going to be ill. The extraordinary point of which withal

was that she was herself ready the instant after to jump into detection

verily, but detection of what wasn't--not at all of what was. His so

helplessly hanging fire represented clearly, to her freshened

perception, and thereby his own still sharper embarrassment, that he had

been thinking more of poor Nan than of the rest of them put together;

though of course when she brought her large irony to bear on this he

could luckily snatch at his obvious retort and make his flushed laugh

invite their companions to see how it righted him. "Did it strike you,

my dear, that when I asked you a while since to take up with me for life

I was really but expressing my interest in another person? If that was

the case," he said to Mrs. Midmore and Perry, "I mean if I wasn't

addressing her as an honest man--which she accuses me of--how could she

guess it and yet at the same time make me such a blissfully happy one?"

The question wasn't indeed in strictness for _them_ to answer, and

Molly, whatever they might have said, met it to her own sufficiency by

another of her wondrous freedoms. "I could love you for a wretch,

cousin, I think, as well as I could love you for a saint!" she cried;

and it gave him at once, he seemed to feel, the luckiest chance for

putting in his most vital plea.

"I don't care what you love me for if it's only as your very truest--and

don't you see that when you doubt of my being so you deny by the same

stroke that I'm the honest man I pretend?"

"Just listen to him, mother--was there ever anything grander than such a

speech and such an air?" Her appeal was of the promptest, and if she

addressed her parent her eyes took note but of her lover, whom, with her

head inclined to one side, she might almost have been regarding in the

light of a splendid picture. "I don't care, I don't care--it sets you

off so to let me torment you. It's when I doubt of you," she said, "that

you'll find me most adoring; and if you should ever dream I'm cold just

draw me on to abuse you." She gave him at this moment and for the first

time the oddest impression of studying him--she had only hugged him

before, with sentiment and sense there had been no pondering; and he

could have wished now she would straighten her head, her carriage of

which had an effect on his nerves. It didn't matter that he believed her

not really to intend this when she wound up with a repetition of her

idea that they must have his portrait, that they must make sure of it

before that first bloom of his expression, as she curiously called it,

should have died down; a particular need of his own came to a head under

her scrutiny quite as much as if he feared probing. "I'm an honest man,

I'm an honest man!"--he said it twice over, strongly and simply,

conscious of a sudden that he enormously wanted to, wanted to with an

inward sharpness of which he had not yet felt the touch. It was a

pressure from within that thus spoke, a pressure quite other than the

driving force that had carried him so far and that he had known but by

its effects, so rapidly multiplied, and somehow as dissociated from

their starting-point or first producing cause as if that origin had been

a spring pressed in somebody else. It was in himself, deep down

somewhere, that his motion of protest had begun, and it really eased him

to give it repeated voice--even if when he had made the point, that of

his honesty, four times over, he had come rather to resemble the lady in

the play of whom it was remarked there that she protested too much. He

felt himself verily colour with his emphasis, and that was not at once

corrected by his having to face the question straightway put by Perry,

who on his side repeated the word once more. "'Honest'? Pray who in the

world, here, cousin, has rudely said you're not?"--_that_ was what he

should have had in consequence decently to answer weren't it that his

wish to clear himself _to_ himself helped him to laugh, with whatever

small flurry, at the challenge.

"It isn't your rudeness, it's your extravagant flattery, you dear

people, that makes me want to warn you that you may find me, on seeing

more of me, less possessed of every virtue than you're so good as to

insist." He looked with his becoming blush from one of them to the

other--becoming we call it because his act of difficulty and thereby of

caution appeared to provoke in each of the women after all but a new,

quite a brighter and fresher shade of interest. Were they going to like

him uncertain better still than they had liked him certain, and if so to

what should he look, besmothered as that must surely make him feel, for

the comfort of knowing where he was for himself? Where he was for Molly,

and by the same token for her mother, was told him by this pleasure they

took in seeing how he had found, to his slight embarrassment, that there

was something to explain. That it was that seemed to set him off in

their eyes, which were so agreeably, if so oddly, affected by almost any

trustful touch of nature or unexpectedness of truth in him. If he had

hoped to please by intention, so he might perhaps have liked even better

to please in spite of himself; notwithstanding which this last liability

did to a degree contribute ease, or even, it might be, rather compromise

dignity. He might for all the world have been _growing_, growing hard,

growing fast; it had begun with the minute of his entering the house,

and especially that room--so that without knowing what at such a rate

one might really grow _to_, one should not yield to the imputation of

being finally measured. There was a singular space of time during which,

while this consideration on the part of the two women so approved him,

approved him verily as against himself, approved him almost as if their

soft hands had stroked him for their pleasure, there hovered before him

the wonder of what they would have done had he been ugly, what they

would in fact do should he become so, in any manner or form--this idea

of his full free range suddenly indulging in a glance at that mode of

reaction. What it all represented was doubtless but his need to express

himself over the felt shock of his ignorance, since if it amounted to a

shock the last way to treat it was to pretend he didn't mind it. He

minded it, he found, very much, and if he couldn't pretend to himself he

wouldn't pretend to the ladies, however they might want him confused for

the enjoyment of smoothing it away. "You have then another daughter whom

I hear of for the first time?" he asked of Mrs. Midmore--and indeed

wellnigh in the tone of defying her to smooth that.

"I'm not in the least ashamed of her or aware of having at any time

tried to conceal her existence!" his hostess said with spirit, yet with

no show of resentment. "And I don't see really what it signifies if you

have simply forgotten her yourself."

Ralph lifted a pair of finger-tips and, with thoughtful eyes on her,

applied them for a moment--in no mere humorous fashion withal--as to a

helpful rubbing of his head. There _was_ something he so wished to make

sure of. "No, I don't think I forget. I remember--when once I know. If

I don't remember I haven't known. So there it is," he said for himself

even more than for his relatives. "Somehow it does signify!"--after

which, however, he threw the matter off with a laugh. "Better late than

never, at any rate."

"I'm glad you grant us that," Mrs. Midmore returned, "for you mustn't

have the appearance, you know, of wanting to cut us down. We're not

after all such a big handful."

He gave a pacifying stroke to his disturbed crop. "No, I mustn't have

any appearance that doesn't fit my understanding. But suppose I should

understand," he put to her the next instant, "something or other that

doesn't fit my appearance?"

"Lord, mother," Molly laughed out on this, "what on earth does the

clever creature mean?"

Mrs. Midmore looked at him harder, as if she herself would have liked to

know, but Perry had intervened before she could make that remark,

addressing his observation, however, to herself. "I'll be hanged if I

see how, if he didn't hear of sweet Nan, he could have learnt so much

about the rest of us."

"Mercy, brother, what a stupid speech!" Molly impatiently exclaimed.

"Does it depend so on sweet Nan that anyone should take an

interest----?" She went on to her brother, but looking with this, in her

rich way, at their kinsman and giving that gentleman thus any number of

her frankest reminders. "How was he not to take in the news that letters

asked for and that letters gave?--and how at all events, for my part, am

I not to be quite content that he makes no stranger of me?"

"Yes, my dear," Ralph at once declared, "it certainly can't be said that

I've made any stranger of you!" He took her reminders and gave her back

for them proportionate vows--in spite of which what she seemed most to

have passed on to him was the name she herself had taken from her

brother. Thus it was that, incongruously enough, it broke from his lips

too. "'Sweet Nan, sweet Nan!'--how could a fellow _not_ be taken by a

thing as charming as that? Sweet Nan, sweet Nan!"--he obeyed the oddest

impulse to say it over and over. With which then, none the less, as if

for avoidance of his turning silly, he addressed to his companion such a

vague extenuating smile as he knew he would have taken, had it been

addressed to himself, for a positive grin of aggravation.

"If you make so much of it as that," Miss Midmore amiably replied, "I

shall have to think you love it better than what you might call _me._"

"Call you? Why, I'll call you anything you like. Miss!" he laughed--but

still too much, as he felt, in the sense of his vagueness.

"Oh upon my word," she tossed up her head to say, "if you can't think

yourself of what I should like I'm not the girl to hunt it up for you."

"What do you say to 'jolly Molly'?" her brother, on this, took leave to

ask, putting the question to Ralph with an unexpected friendly candour.

"If you had heard her named that way wouldn't it have made you want to

know her? But perhaps it was the way, and that it was so you were taken

captive. Of course I don't know, in spite of what they say," he went on,

"what has shaken us so together."

"It must have been that he had heard of you as merry Perry!" the girl at

once retorted; upon which Mrs. Midmore as promptly remarked that she had

never in her life listened to so much nonsense.

"One would really think," she continued to Ralph, "that such things as

letters had never passed between us, and that it's a mistake or a

mystery that Molly herself, from a year ago, wrote to you under my

approval."

"He wrote to me under my own," Molly said, while her bold eyes, all

provoking indulgence, suggested to him again in that connection more

matters than any he immediately grasped. But he felt he must try to

grasp, having somehow got so ridiculously off and away. Of course he

would have written to her, of course he _must_ and with the lapse of

another moment he had expressed this for his relief--making the point to

extravagance in fact, in order to make it at all.

"I wrote you three to your one, you know--which I dare say _you_ will

have noticed," he observed to her mother, "since I hope she was always

pleased enough."

"I grant you, cousin," Perry interposed, "that there has gone on here

for months past such a sight of writing and reading as would have done

credit to a lawyer's office. I congratulate you and congratulate _them_

on what it seems to have meant." He had spoken in franker accommodation

than had yet come from him, and now walked away to the window, where,

looking out, he drew a deep breath again; Ralph remaining struck with

his odd alternations, those, as who should say, of a man who could lose

his ease and fail of his balance and then once more recover them--which

was in fact very much what was happening to our friend himself.

"I suppose you've kept my letters, every one of which I remember, as

I've kept yours," Molly resumed in her great gaiety--"so that I can

bring them down to you tied up with pink ribbons, and then, if we

compare, we'll see who wrote oftenest; though of course I quite allow,"

she smiled, "who wrote best."

Ralph met afresh on this one of his needs to consider. "You have 'em

tied up with pink ribbon?"

"You mean," Molly asked "that you've tied up mine with blue? Or that

you've tied up mother's with black?"

He was conscious, once more, that the truth of this would come to

him--but meanwhile, just for the instant, he wondered and waited.

"You've really got mine to show me?"

"In return for your showing me mine; which--look at him, look at him!"

she said to her mother--"I don't half believe you've kept."

He was obliged to hang fire but a moment longer--it was like that

question of her portrait in his pocket. He hadn't been sure of that, but

the miniature was nevertheless there. Her letters weren't secreted about

his person of course, but where would they be else than at the bottom of

that box at his inn? "If you can prove one of them missing," he was thus

in twenty seconds ready to answer, "I'll chew the rest of 'em up and

swallow 'em, red tape and all."

"Have you tied mine with red tape?" Mrs. Midmore asked in full

amusement.

The pleasure of being certain when he could be certain was, he rejoiced

to note, as great to him as ever. "We don't deal in that article as much

in America, no doubt, as you do here, but one always takes it, you know,

for binding--and if I'm bound with pink ribbon," he said to Molly, "I'll

have you understand that _you're_ tied, my dear, as the lawyers tie up

deeds and contracts. So that's the way," he laughed, "I hold you to your

bargain." With which indeed, however, he had but to hear the elder lady

enrich the air with her assurance that their bargain was the best

witnessed as well as the fairest she had ever had to do with, in order

to feel anew that pinch of conscience, as he could only have called it,

which he had a few minutes before too insufficiently soothed. He might

really have been telling lies within these later instants--by the

measure, that is, of his recurrent wish to establish his innocence of

the other recognition. His need in this connection withal was to be

clearest to Mrs. Midmore. "Ten times on the voyage did I read them all

over, and in fact if she dares to doubt of it I'll repeat every word of

'em before you and her brother--which is a threat, my love, that I think

will keep you quiet," he gaily continued to the girl herself. And he had

on it an extraordinary further inspiration--so far as one such was more

extraordinary than another, and so far as what was now before him, for

instance, was more so than that quick vividness, just recorded, of his

sense, his positive exact vision, of the red-taped packets in the

portmanteau. "I have them by heart with the funny spelling and all; and

if our company only hear, without seeing, your sweetest passages, my

dear, they won't know, they won't know----!"

"That I did once write 'affection' with one 'f', you mean?" Molly broke

in with so little resentment as to convert into light banter on his part

a stretch of allusion which he had risked with a slight fear of excess.

"You'll find also when you look again that I once spelled 'frightful'

_ite_--I remembered it after my letter had gone. And I remember

something else too--which, however, I'll not confess to before them."

"You confess so charmingly," Ralph returned, "that it only makes me love

you the more"--for indeed it really touched him that she didn't protest

with blushes or other missish arts, but showed herself, as he might have

said, splendidly shameless. This after a fashion drew them closer

still--for what was it but the success of his pleasantry? and it struck

him that she had at no moment yet "told" for so frankly handsome as in

seeming thus to invite him but to come on with what humour he would.

This allowed him once more all the taste of finding himself right--so

right that, for the matter of her "friteful", he knew as well, which

meant he remembered, that she had added an 'l' at the end, which she

always did in like case. Of this droll grace he now reminded her, to the

further consecration of the brave intimacy playing between them; the

freedom of which reached a climax, however, in his being able to convict

her at once of the peculiar lapse that she admitted without naming it.

There were moments, light as air, at which he proceeded by spasms of

exhilaration--renewals, that is, of his sense of the sudden, the happy,

the far jump to the point of vantage that just offered room, and no

more, for the tips of his toes, thereby making it a miracle that,

besides exactly alighting, he should afterwards balance himself too in

such pride, the pride well-nigh of the poet's herald Mercury on his

heaven-kissing hill. There it was before him, Molly's own finest flight,

toward the lower right-hand corner of one of her loosest pages. "Your

guilty secret is that of the 'goast' at some haunted house where you had

paid a visit--unless it was but a case of a plural gone wrong and a house

really haunted with goats!"

She met him with the freshest interest over this, and it was

extraordinary how nothing could more have expressed to him what a dear

girl, in fact what a very fine young woman, she was; half the charm

consisting moreover in the oddity that while she used, pen in hand,

wrong letters galore, her lips, the loveliest in all the world, gave

them to the ear in the fairest and rightest fusion, and testified to an

education that would have had nothing to gain, one seemed to see, from

better terms with her inkpot. It was much as if he had known in New York

young women of a common literacy enough who at the same time carried no

further the effect of breeding. His English cousin meanwhile denied, at

any rate, the last aberration imputed to her--it wasn't a bit, she

declared, her actual mistake, which latter, though really a worse one,

he thereby showed he hadn't remarked.

He laughed out his desire to know what could be really finer than the

flower he had culled, and was ready to prove to her that he had other

flowers too by presenting her at her convenience the entire nosegay. The

spirit of this contention on both sides would have continued, no doubt,

to raise the pitch of pleasure hadn't Perry, turning round from his

window as if to stare at a pair of comedians in a play, intervened in a

manner that spoke again of the notable growth of his wit.

"As I think you've never in your life written to me in any absence," he

said to his sister, "of course I can't answer for your way with it,

especially as one has heard that love-letters are always distracted, and

I wouldn't give a rap myself for one that wasn't"--of which last he

rather solemnly notified Ralph. "My sister Nan," he further informed

him, "isn't a girl to lose her head even when she loses her heart;

there's never a word out in anything _she_ writes, and whenever I'm away

from her she does me the kindness."

"Pray how can _you_ judge of her style," Molly asked in derision, "when

you told me but the other day you'd bring me a specimen of your own to

look over and then didn't?--which I think must have been because on your

intending the first letter of your life you found the feat was beyond

you. It was to have been to a lady, didn't I understand?--and you'll

have lost your head, I suppose, even more than your heart, and were

afraid of showing for more distracted than need have been."

Perry Midmore, under this retort, only looked at the girl as if her

humour, keen though it might have been, already found his thought, drawn

off; so that, unexpectedly to Ralph, his defence was but after an

instant to ignore her and make, as with a decenter interest, an appeal

to their guest. "I should like to show _you_, sir, how Nan can acquit

herself, though I'm sure of course that you understand our exchange of

compliments. We bandy words in sport and among ourselves, but don't take

'em, you may well suppose, from any one else. I quite agree with my

mother," he further remarked, "that we're bound to take you for a man of

the greatest taste."

Ralph had already noted in him that his eyes, which seemed to wish for

some restless reason to keep clear of those of his announced

brother-in-law, might at the same time have been resisting with

difficulty some possibly better cause for not appearing to avoid them.

He almost caught himself in the act of wondering after another moment

whether this member of the family were not appointed to interest him

more by a round-about course than the others by the directness which

matched his own and which would perhaps give his own, after all,

comparatively little to do. That flight of fancy couldn't but spring

from the inference, now lively, that Perry was now practising the art of

the straight look very much as he might have practised that of balancing

his stick on his chin. Again with this, however, the difficulty

recurred: wanting himself, and wanting much, to encourage the freedom,

he yet troubled it by the look returned as a sign of that. Should he

have, he asked himself, to shut his eyes so that his cousin might keep

_his_ open upon him? "Take me in, take me in, and see how little it will

hurt you," he felt he should have liked to say; but what came back was

that just the intention of it defeated somehow as by excess of meaning

the act of reassurance. What the devil could have been at stake, he

seemed to see the poor man wonder, when one of the scales, to drop

enough, demanded such a weight as that? All the while, none the less,

Perry's success in facing him did go on. The great thing, Ralph

therefore judged, was for them to miss no breath of real communication

that either might feel he could draw. If either wanted practice here it

was, and by way of proving this wouldn't he himself, our friend

reflected, do just the right thing in playing a little with that

question of the family tone? "Yes," he smiled at his kinsman, though

signifying that he made the point scarce less for the ladies too, "yes,

your way with each other is the pleasantest possible; but all the same,

you know, I somehow feel mixed with it the presence of stronger passions

and--what shall I impute to you?--fiercer characters than I've been used

to in my rather heavy and puritanical part of the world."

"Good Lord, you don't mean to say you're a Puritan!" Mrs. Midmore

quickly exclaimed, in the noblest horror.

"I guess we're all Puritans over there as compared to you," Ralph had no

difficulty whatever in deciding at once to reply. "You're all

high-coloured and splendidly of this world." He found a pleasure in

saying it out, as he had been feeling it so from the first; besides

which it was the remark of broadest application that he had yet

permitted himself, and there was a degree of relief in that. This not

least, either, on his seeing how it stirred Mrs. Midmore up, for nothing

could be clearer than that whenever stirred up she would affect him at

her grandest.

"Do you mean I don't believe in another world than this?" she asked,

"when, as indeed as good a churchwoman as there is in England, I never

miss a proper occasion of declaring it!"

"Well, we're Church folk too in New York, thank God," Ralph said, "but

we've scarcely a church that you'd know from a conventicle, and don't

you see how even in this elegant talk with yourselves I can scarce keep

down my own snuffle?"

"It's you, I'm sure, cousin, who give our conversation its greatest

elegance," Mrs. Midmore returned, "and I can't fancy what you mean by

our high colour----!"

"Any more than I do"--Molly took the word straight from her--"by his

calling us fierce, forsooth, or talking of himself as pale; when he has

as fine a brown skin as one would wish to see if one likes brown men;

which, however, I never dreamed I should, sir!" she wound up as boldly

as ever. "I shouldn't have supposed we were fiercer than a country still

containing so many blacks and savages," she as lightly remarked, "and,

for our passions, I don't hesitate to say, need I, mother and brother?

that I but live to control mine. What in life is our religion for," she

inquired of Ralph with the same ready wit, "what is it for but just to

teach us to do that?" He took her in afresh as she so put the case, but

could pay her the frankest tribute and still return with a laugh: "Of

course it's for that, and all I mean is that you strike me as kneeling

to your Maker very much as you curtsey to your king--doing it too, to

judge by the splendid service I attended at Plymouth after landing,

among as many feathers and frills as ever would deck you out at court."

There were moments when he so liked the way they listened to him as if

his cleverness was beyond their custom that, this impression just now

renewing itself, he could only go on. "Our feathers in America, you

know, serve for the blacks, who bristle with them from head to foot like

so many porcupines when they want to fight us; but," he broke off in

friendly amusement at their reception of this, "there isn't a bravery

you flaunt or a passion you succeed in smothering that I don't perfectly

rejoice in and bless you for. I like you just as you are, and wouldn't

have you or have anything a bit different," he sociably declared; "yes,

yes, I'm more pleased with what I find you than ever I've been with

anything in my life, and not least pleased with my cousin Perry," he

resolutely pushed on; "even though he _will_ look as if he doesn't know

what to make of me and wouldn't trust me a step nearer to him--or is it,

still more than that, a step further than you can keep your eye on me,

cousin?"

He put that question, but neither abating nor enlarging his distance; it

was one of the moments of his holding them under the spell of his

growing brilliancy, as he might for all the world have imagined--too

much under it to move an eyelid for the time, and yet also with the

betrayed impulse to exchange a wink, vulgarly so to call it, between

themselves; the very impulse, all of sharpened comfort surely, to show

each other _where_ they felt together, which he had already more than

once caught in the act of profiting by its quick opportunity. Not their

impulse, however, and not any play of comment that should attest his

success with them, was most matter for thought with him now; but exactly

his himself so wishing to cry out that he was pleased, to say again and

yet again that he liked what was before him, so that there might be no

mistake about it for his own nerves. His nerves, happily and helpfully

active from the first, had been in just that proportion a pleasure to

themselves--so that up to the moment of his first hearing of sweet Nan,

whom he was now so oddly unable to figure save as very peculiarly one

with this term of allusion to her, which might _all_ have been, as they

said in Boston, her "given" name, up to that moment his sail had done

nothing but swell in the breeze. Why the mere hint of _more_ sweetness

still than the already looked for and the already grasped should have

suddenly caused the breeze to drop and the sail to indulge in its first,

its single flap, was not so much his concern as to arrest the

possibility of any like further little waste of force. It was glorious

so to vibrate, but to do it you needed your force--in fact all there was

of it; so that to spend even one throb of it on any mystery of a

particular muffled point or fact was at the best a loose form of

contribution. So played the instinct to make surer still what was sure;

yes, such a truth, for instance, as the perfect practicability of Perry

even, once he should be _really_ reduced to matter of splendid sport.

For didn't it _all_ keep becoming again splendid sport?--that is if he

left out the question of sweet Nan, which seemed something different and

possibly either of a lower sort of interest or of none at all; unless

indeed possibly of a yet greater.

The pitch therefore was at all events that there was no hint of a doubt

as to the clear taste of his feast while it thus continued to be served,

as well as that the right expression could only consist accordingly of

the loudest smack of his lips. The company then, after the fashion we

have noted, admired him at this exercise, and his sense of rich free

words on Mrs. Midmore's and Molly's part, to the effect that their

passing muster with him was perhaps nothing to gape at, had for its

sequel a silent turn of Perry back to the window, though whether or no

in more complete accommodation remained to be seen. He had at any rate

been sufficiently beguiled by his guest's renewed overture of a moment

previous not to wish to rebut at once any impression of this. Ralph

consequently continued a minute longer to celebrate that idea of his

success, as he could but treat himself to the crudity of calling it;

while Mrs. Midmore, on her side, and with the breadth of her wisdom,

recommended him never to overdo the act of humility, since in their

world at least, however it might be in his native, you didn't get much

more than what you were ready to fight for, and had always best set an

example to people's opinion of you.

"Well," he answered to this, "if I like you, all three, for every mark

you carry, every one of 'em without exception, as I again declare, so I

want you to believe in me to the same tune, without my leaving in the

dark a single side by which I may shine. I'll be as proud as you

choose--look at me _now_," he went on, "and see if you can doubt of

that; but I'll be hanged if you shan't love me for my modesty too, since

otherwise you'll miss it when it comes to your giving your friends the

right account of me. You'll want to be able to say enough to excuse

you----!"

"To excuse us pray from what?" Mrs. Midmore sought to know at the very

top of her grand air. "Understand, for goodness' sake, that we excuse

ourselves here, in the civil way, but from things we haven't done, and

that the things we have, the course once taken, the act performed or the

need obeyed, we stick to, please, with nobody's leave whatever asked. I

should like to see, sir," she wound up at this great elevation, "who you

won't be good enough for if you're good enough for us!"

It was just the kind of thing he found he liked to draw from her, though

Molly showed now such a peculiar play of consideration for him as made

his own eyes while he replied signal back to her. "Oh I leave it to you,

I leave it to you--you'll see, as soon as it becomes a question of my

really flourishing, for my own opinion at least, how much I shall leave

to you. I don't say," he added after this fashion to Molly as well,

"that I mayn't do you credit and service as much as you do me, but I'm

not flattering myself that Molly at the utmost will know _all_ my

reasons for delighting in her, or even guess the half of them."

"I'm perhaps better at guessing than you think," the girl returned, "but

I've never myself indeed wanted more reasons for anything than that my

taste is my taste and my choice my choice and that I believe myself able

to defend them."

"Ah you splendour!"--he radiantly took her up. But she had at once gone

on.

"I hope there's nobody I shall praise you to for your being

humble-minded, for I can't think of an acquaintance of ours with whom it

would do you the least good even if you should need the benefit. Look

after your own interests, as mamma says--and we'll look after ours and

let other people look after their's; they seem mostly able to!" And then

as the glow of the sentiment on which she so could practise was still

there in his face it virtually invited, as he could feel, another turn

of her hand. "If that was a compliment to us just now about the strength

of the passions in us, is it your notion that a person's modesty should

figure as one of them? It puts the question, you see, of whether one

would be modestly passionate or passionately modest--and I don't mind

telling you, if you need the information, which you'll have to take from

_me._"

"You give me wondrous choices," Ralph laughed, "but I hope I can get on

with the information I've by this time gained. That is about _you_,

about _you_," and he drew out his considering look at her--any further

intention in which, however, Mrs. Midmore impatiently checked.

"If you can get on with the nonsense she talks you'll do more than I

sometimes can; but I really think, you know," she added, "that you're

teaching us a new language altogether and that in our own dull company

we don't say half such odd things."

"It's perfectly true, mother"--and the girl kept it up at her friend;

"he has made me say more of them in the last half hour, not to speak of

doing 'em, the happy wretch, than in all my long life before!"

"Ah don't speak of any influence of mine," Ralph cried on as earnest a

note as had yet sounded from him--"don't speak as if you didn't yourself

put into my head all the wonder and the pleasure. The proportion in

which I take these things from you is beyond any in which I can give

others back. Do you see what I mean?"--and his earnestness appealed even

to Perry, who had within a minute faced about again as for intelligence

of what was said. Mrs. Midmore's appearance bore out in truth the hint

that _her_ intelligence had reached its term--a fact rendering perhaps

more remarkable any fresh aspiration of her son's. It was at the worst

of immediate interest to Ralph that this worthy, with a positively

amused look at him, at once showed signs.

"If Molly's modest at all," he maturely observed, "she makes the point,

I judge, that she's passionately so; whatever that may mean, she's

welcome to the comfort. But _I_ make the point," he said with increasing

weight, "that my sister Nan, sweet Nan as you properly name her, fits on

the other cap--the more becoming, as I understand it, to any young

woman."

"Sweet Nan, he wants you to understand," Molly intervened on this, "is a

shrinking flower of the field, whereas I'm no better than one of the

bedraggled!"

"I see, I see"--our hero jumped to the vision: "you're the one

infinitely talked about, as how shouldn't you be? But your sister has

her virtue."

"Her virtue, Lord bless us," Mrs. Midmore took him up: "why I hope to

heaven she has, with so little to speak of else; though she'll be glad,

no doubt, cousin, to know that you answer for it!"

"Oh there are all kinds of virtue!" Ralph still laughed in his

harmonising way--which his hostess, however, on that article, wouldn't

have too much of.

"I never heard of but one kind, which is quite enough. Thank you for

putting on us more!" And she wished to know of her son what possessed

him to make such claims. "If we work you up so about the child," she

inquired of Ralph as well, "how shall you not be disappointed?--let her

have as she will for you the making of a brave little sister."

"Oh but I can imagine nothing better than a little sister to match the

bravery of the rest of you, the brave little brother and the brave

little bride, walking all three in the steps of the brave great

mother--since you're so good, madam, as to become in some degree mine

too. I'm sure," our young man declared, "that all Perry wants is to fit

to our shy sister that other cap of Molly's--which one is it, my dear?"

he asked directly of this young woman; and then before she could say:

"Oh yes, the pale passion of modesty, which you won't let _me_ fall back

on: for the want, I mean, of a better one among ourselves at home."

"How do you know Nan's shy?" the girl demanded straight; "for it can't

be as if you knew by being so yourself! Can't you understand," Molly

pursued, "that the man of my taste _has_ only to be as bold as a lion

and to think of nothing less?"

"Well, I don't of course know that she's shy--that is I _didn't_; though

I was guided so well by my apprehension of yourself. Yes"--and he looked

about at them with the fairly musing gravity of this recognition--"I

shouldn't much mind, you see, if I didn't fairly seem so to miss it!"

"Miss _what_, sir, in the name of goodness?" Molly asked with

impatience; "when you pull a face as long as if you were missing your

purse! You don't suspect us, I hope, of hugging you to rifle your

pockets!"

He felt himself flush, and also, with his eyes on them again

successively as to show them how he smiled, felt the probability of his

looking silly. "I make too much of it, I know; but what I miss is my

having been right; I mean, don't you see," and still foolishly he heard

himself explain, "about--well, about what we were saying."

"Do you understand our clever cousin, mother dear, after all?" Molly

wailed in a filial appeal.

Mrs. Midmore's own attention helped to point the doubt. "He mustn't be

_too_ terribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being

so extraordinary; but I'm sure you'll take it in good part if I remind

you that there is a limit."

"Yes, of course there must be!" he quite seriously agreed.

"A limit, I mean"--she bridled a little--"to our poor old English wit."

"Oh that's another matter--and when you look at me in a certain

way--even when Perry does," he declared, though he could have bitten his

lip the next moment for his "even"--"I'm more afraid of it than I ever

was of anything in my life. I took your reminder to be for the limit of

our pleasure together; though why," he demanded of Molly, "should we

fall to speech of that when the article itself has scarcely so much as

begun? I do enjoy you--I do, I do!"--and he showed, almost with

vehemence, that he meant it for them all. "It's for that very reason I

should have liked to be wholly right. But there I am again!" he

laughed--"I can't keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse, for

though it was short it was sharp. However----!" And he beamed in

resolute relief upon brave Molly.

"You can't keep off my everlasting little sister--that's what you can't

keep off!" her bravery answered, though rather as to put it as helpfully

as possible to his comprehension than to make a circumstance of her

pretending to a jealousy that might or that mightn't become her. She

struck him at that instant as not a little puzzled, and he had already

felt how moving, in a person of her force, an unexpected patience would

easily be. He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of

apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour

and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was

surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would

be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that thus seemed for

the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature.

"Well, but it isn't she, it's my own stupidity where I ought

particularly not to have been stupid." He replied with the good-humour

which he desired to feel so much more than anything else, and would have

explained further but that she cut him straight off--he did of a truth,

in spite of everything, keep giving her such opportunities.

"Is what's so dreadfully the matter with you, pray, that if you had

known there were two of us I'm exactly the one you wouldn't have

preferred?--so that you took me in other words only because supposing

there was nobody better!"

"There _could_ be nobody better, love!" he promptly enough laughed--and

yet somehow felt it a little weak for the absurd intensity of the

question; since the case _was_ really that, more and more desirable as

she grew with every point she made, it did inwardly and inexpugnably

beset him that the fine possession of truth on which he had been acting

wasn't then so very fine if it left a secret humiliation possible. There

was a word on his tongue that would help indeed to preserve the secrecy;

which was stayed, however, by a prior word of Mrs. Midmore's.

"Does the younger girl, in America, cousin, push in for an establishment

before her elders are properly settled?" The question, uttered with all

kind coolness, referred itself, as he felt, to the perfect proprieties,

yet nothing had so placed the speaker in the light of the manners

surrounding them, and he couldn't have told why it was unanswerable save

by his going into more things, and perhaps even meaner things, than he

then could care for. He wasn't, was he? pledged to Molly, or she to him,

through her being offered in the order of the proprieties; but his

kinswoman, in spite of this, could easily have convinced him that his

not taking her point would be low. For what was the old order in which

he found himself so triumphantly, even so pantingly, float but a grand

order? and what his having at some moments to breathe so hard but the

very attestation of his equal strength? It was when he breathed hardest,

he again recognised, that his throbs meant most to him; and he perhaps

hadn't been so little at a loss for anything as now for the right humour

and the right look. "It's everywhere easier, I suppose, to find a wife

than to find a husband, but marrying, as in all new countries, I take

it, proceeds so fast that you'd scarce notice by watching among us, in

any company, who comes in first. Those who do that here," he developed

at this high level of urbanity, "do it doubtless by a longer stretch

than we ever have to show; but how shall I tell you what I mean by there

not being perhaps so many there to come in last--or such a difference

even, for that matter, between last and first? I dare say you wouldn't

at once know many of 'em apart."

These were still for his audience wondrous explanations--they plainly

required among the three some art of following; though the three, it was

to be added, combined at moments, rather oddly, an appearance, a

positive hush, of blankness, with the signified sufficiency of their own

usual names for things. "We're not accustomed to think here that the

last are as good as the first," Mrs. Midmore said, "and if you want to

see the differences there _can_ be between them I flatter myself we

shall have plenty to show you. You must let me tell you too," she went

on, "that now that I know you I don't believe a word of their all

dancing in America to such a tune as yours, and I believe it exactly

least when you argue in such a pretty way for it."

This appeared so to express her daughter's feeling too that Molly

borrowed at once the fortunate word. "And his being a bachelor in spite

of it, what's his argument for _that_, I should like to know! If it's so

easy to marry there, and nobody can keep out of it, somebody ought to

have caught you before poor me--though I'm sure I'm much obliged to all

of those who failed."

"Ah, my dear, none of 'em quite 'failed'" Ralph laughed.

"'Quite, quite'?"--she echoed his amusement. "A miss is as good as a

mile, and a girl either gets a husband or doesn't. Unless you mean"--she

kept it up--"that though single you're engaged: to some other sweet

creature, or perhaps to a dozen, as well as to me." And then while he

felt himself exceed his smile as she blazed on him with this, "I don't

_hold_ a man single who drags about twenty hearts: he's no better than

Bluebeard himself--unless found out in time."

"Fortunately I'm found out in time then," Ralph again laughed--"that is

in time to give you the key of the dreadful room and yet trust in spite

of it to your courage--not to say to your regard."

"'Regard' is a fine word when you mean my foolish curiosity!" With which

of a sudden she looked at him, he seemed to know, still harder and more

intendingly than hitherto--to the effect in fact of his feeling more

than ever how sufficiently he must meet it. That sufficiency, yes, took

all his care--pulling on it there quite supremely; but there was notably

always the luck that whereas such exchanges with her might have resulted

for him most of all in the impression of something almost deadly in her

force, what kept overriding them was the truth of her beauty. If this

last indeed was of itself a deadly force he could but oppose to it an

accepted fate--for what turn of her head, of her hand or of her spirit

wasn't somehow a flash of that treasure? How she knew as much herself

too, and fairly bettered it by rejoicing in it! "If I stare you out of

countenance--and I do, mother, don't I, if you'll look at him!--it's

because I'm not ashamed of my curiosity, or of any other good reason for

looking at you! I thank you for the key, as you call it," she laughed

on, "and I'm sure I already see the poor things strung up in their

dreadful row."

"You must really forgive her for a nasty torment," said Mrs. Midmore on

this, and not a little as if she had seen that he _was_ out of

countenance. "I should think very ill of you if you had broken no

heart--_I_ had clean broken a dozen before I patched up my husband's.

After that, however, I assure you I kept my hands quite off; and if

Molly will expect you to do as much now yourself, it's no more than

you'll expect of her and that I give you my word for it I'll back you

in. I should be ashamed of her as well, I don't mind saying, if nobody

had been the worse for her--though of course one knows how much less a

gentleman need be the worse than a female. It isn't to me at any rate

that I ask you to confess," she nobly and brightly added.

"Well, I confess to _one!_" Ralph on this felt himself moved to break

out. He had visitations, had been having them uninterruptedly and with

a vengeance--looking for them, invoking them, enjoying them as they

came; but there was one that took him by surprise and that in the oddest

way sinned by excess. He hadn't three minutes before expected it, and as

soon as he had spoken it seemed irrelevant. There it was none the less

for himself, and at least, with his bravest ring, he could stick to it.

"One, yes, one. I won't disown her. That is," he qualified, "I was

myself greatly smitten, and seem to have let her know it. But I must

have let her know it," he laughed, "in vain!"

"You 'seem to have'?" Miss Midmore echoed--"but you're not quite sure,

any more than of how she treated you? It must have been one of your pale

passions, as you call 'em, truly--so that even if her ghost does hover I

shan't be afraid of so very thin a shade."

Our young man cast about as in some wonder of his own, meeting now but

for a moment the eyes of none of them. "Yes, it's a thin shade--and

melts away hiding its face, even while I look back at it."

"She may well hide her face," Mrs. Midmore improvingly cried, "if she

was ever such a fool as not to have felt your worth. Still," Ralph's

hostess went on with her fine air at its finest, "it's a comfort to know

the worst of you--which seems to be no more than that you recover easily

from disappointments."

Ralph faced her for this, his wonder again in his eyes--that wonder at

himself which had on occasion, as appeared, a sharper play than any

inspired by his friends. "I don't know about that--no! But as I'm not

disappointed now, and am plainly not going to be," he at once added, "I

don't see that the question matters. And when once I learn a thing I

learn it--I do really make it my own," he added by an odd transition. "I

had to learn--that was my point--about sweet Nan; but now that I have,

but now that I know it's as if I had known always, or have at any rate

lived down my surprise." He put that to them thus with earnest frankness

and as if it might much relieve and interest them; and was moved with it

in fact further to image their general dependence. "It's as if there

were a few doors that don't yield to my push--though we've seen most of

them fly open, haven't we? Those I mean have to be opened from within,

as you've also seen." And again his point was made for his listening

friends by that fine ingenuity which they either, to judge by something

recurrent in their faces, couldn't sufficiently admire in him or

couldn't sufficiently follow. "The case is that when once I am in the

room it takes on quite the look of nature--at the end of almost no

time." And then as with the quality of a certain hush in them beyond any

of the several he had already had occasion to note his bringing about,

he plunged deeper rather than shook himself free--dived to pick up, as

who should say, just the right pearl of cheer. "I'm not speaking

literally of this room--though it does strike me as extraordinarily

beautiful. I've taken it all in--there isn't a spare cool grace in it

that I don't admire." He waved at it all vaguely while they stared--yes,

more than ever stared. What was he saying, what was he saying? he even

inwardly questioned under the effect of that; which effect too, however,

was that of his not caring so long as he cleared the matter for himself.

"I mean a kind of idea of a room; so that catching the idea is what I

call crossing the threshold. The thing is that when I catch it I really

hold it, don't you see? The thing is that when I know where I am all the

rest falls together and I then defy any bewilderment. But I have to know

where I am first. I did that perfectly the moment I came in here, the

moment I came in there below. I defy you," he smiled and smiled to the

three, "to prove on me any bewilderment--save that of course about sweet

Nan, which we've all now got completely over." The pearl of cheer, held

up between his fingers, threw out its light at them after the manner of

pearls. "I've lived into _her_ truth--yes, lived on into it, and all in

a few minutes, shouldn't you say, doing me that justice? So that now I'm

ready for anything."

It was Perry who took this up first, though not till after an interval,

curiously prolonged to Ralph's measure, during which that appearance for

our friend of his companions' helpless failure of any sign of their

reading into his solicitous speech an imputable sense, however off-hand

the imputation, amounted practically to a rupture of relation with them

and presented them to his vision, during a series of moments, wellnigh

as an artful, a wonderful trio, some mechanic but consummate imitation

of ancient life, staring through the vast plate of a museum. It was for

all the world as if his own interpretation grew, under this breath of a

crisis, exactly by the lapse of theirs, lasting long enough to suggest

that his very care for them had somehow annihilated them, or had at

least converted them to the _necessarily_ void and soundless state. He

could understand that they didn't, and that this would have made them

take him for mad, the chill and the dismay of which--felt for that

matter by Ralph too--turned them to stone or wood or wax, or whatever it

was they momentarily most resembled. The chill was a true felt drop of

the temperature, the waft across them all of a mortal element, mortal at

least to the others and menacing, should it have continued, to himself.

That it couldn't possibly have continued, at such a portentous pitch,

however, was the next instant standing out to sharpness in the fact of

natural sound, sound borne up to them as from the cobbles of the Square

and floating familiar life back to them. Perry's voice it was,

positively, that had the warmth, and that was already, for the good of

all of them, translating the suspense into terms. "Are you ready for Sir

Cantopher?" he asked of Ralph with a pertinence which, as soon as thus

attested, seemed to have picked up our young man's declaration with an

overreaching hand. _There_ was something they could rally to,

particularly as a loud rubadubdub at the door had followed the report of

arrested coach-wheels before it. "Ah, there the dear man is!" Mrs.

Midmore at once recovered her faculty to say--even if all to the

immediate effect of calling on Ralph first to search his own.

"Sir Cantopher, Sir Cantopher?" It was nature again for Ralph even if it

was in its prime newness uncertainty. And it was uncertainty but just

enough to prepare his glow of response. "Sir Cantopher Bland? Why,

there's nothing I shall more prize than the honour of his acquaintance."

"He looks forward eagerly to the pleasure of yours," Mrs. Midmore

remarked with clear assurance; so that Molly was the last to

speak--which she did all to the tune again of her own high colour.

"I hope it won't interfere with your liking him, sir, that as you've

been so taken with the fancy of my sister, he's taken worse still and

from years and years ago."

"Oh he's in love with her? Yes surely, I know that--know it now," Ralph

added.

"Of course you know it when I tell you, dear," the girl returned

smiling, but with her eyes, it struck him, searching him as we have just

noted his having had to search himself. He felt it as more of a watch of

him in spite of his word than anything had yet been, and this he

resented in proportion to his pride in the fine presence of mind he had

so quickly recovered. So that made him positively go further, go in fact

a length which was the longest he had used up to now.

"Ah I know more than you tell me, I know what I've _been_ knowing. Of

course he is in love with Nan," he made out "almost as much in love with

her as I'm with you. Only with the difference," it came to him, "that

his passion isn't returned----!"

"As I return yours is what you mean, dear?"--she took him straight up.

And then when he had quickly pronounced this exactly what he meant, with

a glance too at the fact that so much was evident, he had still to meet

her asking how he could be so sure when they had been having it from

him, and to the extent of his fairly complaining, that no information

about her sister had ever reached him. The effect--he at once took this

in--was of his being fairly cross-questioned, so that he should somehow

be put to the proof of what he might say with the very entrance of the

gentleman who would have already alighted below and perhaps be now on

the stair. She really pushed it quite home. "You complained, you know,

my dear, that we had left you in such ignorance."

"Ignorance of Nan, yes--only not ignorance of Sir Cantopher, at least as

a ground of complaint. But I don't mind a bit, you see, what I didn't

know before: that's all made up to me," he found himself pleading, "and

I _want_ so, don't you understand? to be with you in everything."

It was not unapparent to him meanwhile either that Mrs. Midmore, during

this exchange, was momentarily mystified at her daughter's share in it,

or that Perry, quite detached apparently from any question of a step

toward their visitor, had witnessed for _his_ attention by turning again

to the window. But it was to himself directly that his hostess addressed

a more confessedly puzzled expression than had yet comported for her

with her dignity. "My child must sometimes seem to give you the

absurdest notice of a temper!" And then after an instant to the girl:

"Don't, you gipsy, make yourself out _more_ of a romp than nature has

done." With which she appeared really, as the surer way, to appeal again

to Ralph, who noted at the same time, however, that she might, by the

betrayal of her eye, have caught some sense of her daughter's reason.

"When everything's so right," she asked, "how can anything be

wrong?"--and she had put no other question with so near an approach to a

quaver.

"Do you think that to turn your head isn't what I most wish in the

world?" were the only words, and splendidly spoken to her lover, with

which Molly took up the remonstrance. "Mother herself knows that, just

as I know how she wants it scarce less. But all the same, dear sir," she

continued thus forcibly to reason, "I must put common sense between us

for _your_ sake even if I can do with fancy for my own. It isn't a thing

to quarrel about, even if anything _could_ be," she shiningly pursued,

"but you must keep your head steady enough to satisfy me here. If you

hadn't been aware of our friend's cross mistress, how could you be aware

of our friend himself, who thinks of nobody else, and even talks of

nobody, when he can get tired ears to listen?"

Ralph felt himself in the box, but also that never was a witness to have

seen his embarrassment so enrich his interest. "Oh is she cross----?"

The tone of the cry must have been comically candid, for it moved the

ladies together to such a spasm of mirth that Perry, who wasn't amused,

looked round to see why. Before which even, however, their kinsman had

continued much to the same effect: "And he thinks and talks of

nobody----?" Though with all gaiety, since they were gay, he corrected

it a little for Perry. "Of course, of course--he does as he likes!"

Perry faced him on it. "He does indeed--and why in the world shouldn't

he? It's the kind of gentleman he _is._"

This was really, for Perry, an explanation, and Ralph beamed

acknowledgment. "It will be delightful to see the kind as you grow them

here!"

"Ah nobody could be more civil," Mrs. Midmore interposed, "and very few,

I assure you, cousin, are so clever and so keen. But surely, as he

doesn't come up, you should wait on him below," she said to her son.

This worthy none the less didn't stir; he only stood looking at Ralph;

with which, to the latter's surprise, he carried explanation further. "I

don't say he's _my_ man, mind you"--it was positively pacific. "And you

can guess whether I'd be _his_, as my mother describes him--apart I mean

from his liking Nan and our wishing to see her suited."

"Which she isn't of course," Ralph said, "if she doesn't like _him!_" It

was as if Perry of a sudden had opened to him, and as if moreover,

feeling this, he couldn't too cordially meet it. He met it most indeed

by carrying his response on to Molly. "I see her as 'cross'--so far as

'sweet Nan' admits of that--because of her perhaps fearing that you want

to overbear her. That is that you all together do, I mean--for I don't

make it personal to yourself, dear!--and, as she holds out against you,

treat her to the discipline of bread and water in a moated grange to see

if it won't bring her round." The way to deal with his mistress, he more

than ever felt, was to deal to extravagance--which was clearly at this

moment so right that it seemed to invite him to pile it up. "If she'll

have him you'll take her back, but if she won't, that is _till_ she

gives way, she's reduced to her crust and her cell. Only," he asked to

the same effect, "how can Sir Cantopher himself suppose such rigours

will serve him?"

"Here _is_ Sir Cantopher himself, to satisfy you!" Mrs. Midmore

cried--for the opened door now gave passage to the footman who had

admitted Ralph and who announced the awaited friend. She called her

welcome to this personage almost before he appeared. "You take your

time, you pampered thing--when we've never so much wanted to see you!"