The Sense of the Past

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!”