Detmold: A Romance: Part Ii

III.

DETMOLD.

IT was true, as gayly intimated by Hyson on the evening of the rencontre at the Café Dante, that another motive than interest in the Old World for its own sake had brought Detmold to Europe. Not that this interest was not genuine and powerful, but he had his own way to make; and unless his cooler judgment had been overborne by an impulse too strong to resist, he would not have yield-

ed to it and postponed by just so much his progress towards an established standing in the profession he had chosen. This impulse was at first only an unceasing desire to be again within sight and sound of a beautiful girl who had taken his fancy captive. He was not willing that Alice should add to the countless respects in which she was already his superior that of foreign travel, in which upon her return he could have no sympathetic associations in common with her. There would also be a satisfaction, even if a painful one, in observing what effect was being produced by the new and varied scenes in which she was now immersed, adverse to hopes which, although for reasons to be explained he dared not unreservedly cherish, he could not bring himself wholly to abandon. This first impulse developed into a settled and all-absorbing plan.

The young architect, shortly after his first arrival and settlement at Lakeport, had met Alice in some of its social gayetics. She was tall, charmingly dressed, soft and melodious in speech, and of engaging manners. She seemed capable of being a belle of the most despotic sort, had she chosen, as she apparently did not, to make a coquettish use of her powers. What especially attracted him was an eminently lady-like carriage and an air of being permeated through and through with refined and elegant influences. It affected him like a delicate perfume. He could estimate such adventitious circumstances at their true value, and refused to yield to baseness and pretense any greater respect on account of them. But to real worth they added, in his view, such an enhancement as is given by human skill even to materials in themselves the most rare. There had been harsh facts in his own life which caused him to attach an extraordinary preciousness to cultivated and perfected beauty, from familiarity with which he had been too much shut out-

He was introduced at the house of the Starfields, as at many others, by college classmates, who were glad to renew an old acquaintance that had been pleasant.

They welcomed him to Lakeport, and extended to him as far as lay in their power its hospitalities. He made a quietly agreeable impression and was well received.

It was a comfortable, spacious home, furnished in accordance with the taste of a merchant who aimed at a becoming solidity instead of the complicated flimsiness much affected by his neighbors. There were good servants, horses of the best stock, a trifle too fat, and conveyances of numerous styles. The head of the house, wherever mentioned, was recognized on the instant as one of the foremost men of his city. He was identified with most of its important industries. He presided over numerous banks and companies, over the board of trade, and meetings to raise volunteers and to alleviate the distress of grasshopper sufferers. If a few persons of eminent responsibility were wanted for park or water board, or commissioners of the public debt, he was invariably of the number. He had declined political preferments, but in the prodigality of titles which it is even more our passion to delight to bestow than to solicit, he had not escaped a complimentary prefix. He was spoken of in the press and on public occasions as “ Honorable,He was wont to indulge in the good-natured sarcasm at the politicians that he was called Honorable because he had never held an office.

His wife was a stout lady, of genial manners and excellent management, in virtue of which the household affairs ran smoothly. Alice was the youngest child of a considerable family, most of whom were now married and domiciled in the neighborhood of their home, at which they were frequent visitors. It was known by but a few that Alice was not the own child of the Starfields. She was in fact an adopted daughter, taken, it was vaguely understood where anything of the matter was known, from some distant relatives in reduced circumstances. But it was something of such long standing — she had been received into the family at so early an age — that it was practically unknown abroad and almost forgotten at home.

A coincidence of tastes contributed to facilitate the acquaintance between Alice and Detmold. It had been the plan of Mr. Starfield, in order to provide against the contingencies to which the best secured fortunes are subject, that each of his children should attain a measure of proficiency in some pursuit by which it would be possible, if necessity required, to procure a living. Alice had chosen painting. Detmold was able to give her some hints and assistance upon technical points from experience of his own in the same department. She painted coldly, in accordance, as he sometimes thought from other indications, with a constitutional tendency. He endeavored to infuse more warmth into her coloring. She showed a fondness for going thoroughly to the bottom of things, and made perspective and anatomical drawings which her circle of acquaintances considered astonishing and eccentric. Detmold’s admiration did not blind him to the fact that, though an interested student, she was not a genius, and that her labors were not likely to result in the production of masterpieces. But what did it matter? Bent above her easel she was herself a charming picture. The most accomplished painter could have designed nothing more agreeable.

It was in this comfortable home, well warmed, clad in delicate raiment, sheltered from every rude shock under the protecting ægis of a parent who was a power in the community, that Detmold first saw Alice at the age of twentythree. He was one year her senior. When he found himself, even in his dreams, planning to bear her away to share his own precarious fortunes, he checked himself with a sense of cruelty, but even more decidedly with a recognition of what he considered the decree of an unpropitious destiny. There were reasons why, although he dearly loved her, he could allow himself no thought of the consummation for which ordinary lovers hope. Nothing so surely as any steps towards a formal marriage would throw a flood of publicity upon a subject into which he shunned inquiry with a dread that amounted to horror. Over this amiable young man of a poetic and ambitious nature there had hung, from his cradle, a shadow. It was not the lighter because it had rarely been penetrated by any about him, but rather the heavier by so much as the apprehension of disgrace is more painful than its reality. The secret, whatever its nature, was connected with his birth and parentage. No reference to these subjects or to his early youth ever escaped him. His sensitiveness was continually upon the alert, and even those reminiscences of others, so common in every-day conversation, which bore in this direction caused him alarm and embarrassment. His secret dragged upon him and hampered the full manifestation of his excellent powers as heavy garments impede the action of an accomplished swimmer. There was a distance within which the most cordial advances made to him could not reach. He felt himself, with a sense of self-reproach varying in intensity but never wholly absent, a hypocrite and a pretender. Was he sure that if all were known, exhibitions of friendship would not be replaced by coldness and disgust? It was this feeling — by no means abated by a contemplation of the inequality of their fortunes—'that determined Detmold’s early admiration for Alice into a worship which was an object in itself and had no expectation of anything beyond.

Let ns see upon how tangible a basis this morbid sensibility rested. He was the son of a man of prominence in a small Western community, whither after his first departure from it for his Eastern schooling he seldom repaired. It was an Illinois city of perhaps ten thousand inhabitants. Such a town is little more than a good-sized family. Each resident knows familiarly the concerns of all the others.

The elder Detmold was a thick-set, vigorous man, rather rustically dressed, and not above sitting upon a box or bale in his store of general supplies and conversing affably with all comers. Had you asked for an account of him you would have learned that he paid dollar for dollar, his credit was unexceptionable, he adhered both to the letter and the spirit of his obligations. In the inquisitorial reports of the commercial agencies his hieroglyphic was E. 1. It denotes an estimated capital of from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand dollars, and the highest credit. He took advantage of no one; he subscribed to charities both public and private. He was a man of education and original refinement. But upon this square-dealing merchant, with sometimes a humorous twinkle and sometimes a sad light in his gray eye, rested an ineffaceable stigma, — the stigma of crime years and years remote, bitterly atoned for, forgiven but never forgotten. Four and twenty years before he had violated the law and suffered its heavy penalty. With a strange perversity he had returned, when the prison gates were opened, with his wife and a child born during his absence, to his former home. Where he had lost his reputation and sinned and been subjected to shame, he chose to recover it. The step was looked upon with indignation as an open defiance of public decency. He was alone; his former partner and companion in guilt, who had escaped sentence, had disappeared. The returned convict set to work at the humblest occupations. He became a daylaborer in the streets. Any becomingness of dress or habits of ease in which he had once indulged were discarded. He rose to be an employer of labor, and in course of time became a leading contractor. He built roads, streets, sewers, bridges, and, later, even railways. He was said to pay his men better wages, treat them more considerately, and perform his work with more scrupulous exactness than any of his competitors.

Good-natured gentlemen, tipped back in office chairs, away from the sterner morality of their women, admitted his virtues freely, and held that there was no telling what any man might do under strong enough temptation. No one abstained from the fullest business relations with him. A few at last opened their doors socially to him and his wife; but in spite of the best intentions these advances were made so much a merit of, and served so forcibly to draw attention to what was withheld, that they were more painful than pleasant, and were rarely accepted. These long years of steadfast integrity and close observance were rewarded with popular respect, but oblivion could not be purchased. Newcomers to Marburg rarely lost the story of Detmold’s fall, not told out of malice, but idly, for the sake of the surprise which it never failed to elicit. The husband and wife, long habituated to the situation in all its phases, bore it at last calmly and without pain.

Not so the child born to them in the first agony of disgrace, within the shade of the prison walls. He was permeated wholly with the bitter essence of the time and place. By a species of remorseless equilibrium, as the parents grew gravely reconciled to their lot, they saw the child become shiveringly sensitive to the slightest breath of disrepute. In the unhappy early days before a long martyrdom had caused any portion of the offense to be condoned, he learned that his father “had worn striped clothes ” and was a “ jail - bird.” In the taunts of some of his playmates and the holding aloof of others he saw a wall raised up about him which seemed to exclude him from association with his kind. Hide as he would in the deepest recesses of his home, he could not wholly avoid idle words which filled him with rage and anguish. To escape this unhappiness, which renewed again the suffering of his parents, the boy was sent almost Continuously to distant schools. The story followed dimly even there, and came after long respites to impair and cripple the growing confidence which he gained from association with his fellows upon equal terms. The secret became the central fact, and dread of its disclosure the absorbing fear, of his life. It lay in the midst of consciousness like one of those dark tarns upon an Alpine pass, into which the brightness of the surrounding snows lapses and is dissipated.

Castelbarco, who was his schoolmate in these days, heard with others from the lips of some malicious or heedless urchin the tale of Detmold’s father’s crime, with none of the mitigating circumstances of the history.

As Detmold grew older and was surrounded by reasoning persons, who, if they knew his secret, were rarely capable of using it to wound him, he took more heart. At his Eastern university — for his father with a kind of bravado had determined to give him advantages which few or none of the other youth of the vicinity enjoyed — he won honors, engaged in manly exercises, made friendships, and had no external reminders of the disgrace which rested so darkly upon his antecedents. He reflected much in what honor and shame to the individual consist. He found it just that society should place a premium upon honesty and virtue by visiting with opprobrium the criminal, and perhaps even his descendants. For himself he saw no refuge except in a continuance of his policy of concealment. He came forth with a character deeply tinged by his peculiar sorrow, but disciplined, accomplished, and in many ways well equipped for the strife of every-day existence.

He was now to choose a profession. His father’s preference was the law. He would have had him return with his Eastern accomplishments to electrify the whole section round about, and make the name synonymous with marked ability and honor as it now was with odium. But the young man wished rather to settle in some distant locality, where even the name of his town should never be heard of. He confessed this feeling to his father, and implored him, as he had often done before, to remove from a scene where they had all suffered so much. This the elder Detmold could not or would not do. Whether it was, as is probable, that his property interests were so vested that they could not be removed; or that, so long past the age when change has any attractions, he shrank from entering upon new scenes and pursuits; or that, in fine, he believed in the entire reconciliation of public sentiment to himself and desired to pursue to a round and even completion the course he had marked out for himself, he refused to entertain the idea. He even hoped that in process of time the acute sensitiveness of his son and his aversion to his home would be outgrown.

The law was not to the taste of Detmold. He chose engineering, one of those professions in which it seemed more possible to do humanity a tangible service, and in which some skill with his pencil and the mechanical aptitude which he possessed, would come in play. But very early in the course of his studies at Hew York he made the acquaintance of some accomplished young architects, and examined their works. The union of the useful with the beautiful in this occupation greatly attracted him. The draughtsmanship of engineering is cold, and its achievements appeal to no sentiment but that of utility. But here was room for unlimited ingenuity of contrivance, with full opportunities for the indulgence of æthetic inspirations.

He fell in with instructors and associates who were even more thoroughly artists than architects. They were mediævalists, and believed the thirteenth century the golden age of the world’s existence. Their prophet was Ruskin, and their temple the Ca d’Oro at Venice. They had sketches by a so-called preRaphaelite school of artists upon their walls, and upon their book-shelves the works of the poets Rossetti and William Morris, with little vases painted by hand, and mosaics of Salviati. Their plans were not simply aids to putting up satisfactory buildings. Each was a picture, with its lights, shades, and calculated effects. Soft and harmonious washes, the most pleasing projection of shadows, the effect of mats and various mountings, the character of frames, — often painted in person, with conventional ornaments, — were made objects of research.

Detmold learned to design cottages for Newport and villas for the suburban towns as irregular and delicate as castles in Spain. He gave them diamond window panes fixed in leaden sashes. The shadows lingered softly under their spacious porches; their fantastic gables and chimneys were projected against paleblue cirrus skies or banks of piled-up thunder clouds. In the foreground he placed tall figures in dreamy attitudes. His father during this time made him an allowance which would have been munificent at home, but in the metropolis needed to be husbanded with careful economy.

It may be imagined that coming with such a training to Lakeport, a thriving city intensely devoted to money-getting, and largely settled by self-made people of the first generation, Detmold did not seem to fall at once into his proper groove.

His competitors here were mainly master-builders, who took contracts and were in the habit of furnishing the plans free of charge. Others were scarcely more than builders’ brokers, who made nominal charges to their patrons for architectural services, but derived their real profit from the mechanics in whose favor they were able to influence contracts. Detmold adopted none of these methods, and his progress was correspondingly slow. It is likely that this was not due to the refinement of his ideas so much as to a deficiency in push and bluster. There is evidence to show that the most rough-and-ready business men are not intractable in these matters if rightly managed. Had Detmold properly asserted himself and advertised his importance, Lakeport would have been ready enough to adopt his notions, and place its churches, banks, and schoolhouses in his hands, to do what he pleased with. Still, he was a hard and persevering worker, and there was little doubt of his ultimate success. He entered into competitions for court-houses, hospitals, and jails, — lingering upon the details of the last with a gloomy ingenuity and tenderness. In the second year of his stay he made almost a thousand dollars. In the next two there was a falling off.

During these years, with all the celerity of transit that brings the remotest points together, and the multiplied possibilities of disclosure in other ways, Detmold rested undisturbed. The Illinois city in which his secret was hidden lay to the southward of the most direct routes to Lakeport, and had no commercial relations with it. Neither visitors nor rumors arrived to aggravate his ever alert sense of distrust. The better society of the place received him without misgivings, and he participated freely in its diversions. He used his opportunities as much as possible to be brought into contact with Alice. He was often in her drawing room; he walked and rode and made sketches with her, touched her hand in the dance, and sat by her side when passing companies, on their way to and from the metropolis, gave in the theatre of the place the popular music and dramas of the day. He endeavored by small gifts or the contrivance of some surprise to keep her always in mind of him. His friends bantered him a little about his preference. It was even said by the gossips, who invent such things upon a very slight basis, that they were engaged. Even the faint connection established by this rumor filled him with delight. Alice, if she heard it too, paid it no manner of attention. He had known her to say that if one were incommoded by such reports it would be necessary to abandon nearly all one’s friends.

There was in truth no basis for it. The intercourse of Alice and Detmold during the three years of their acquaintance was never free from a trace of constraint. He recognized sadly that it arose from his own want of candor, the influence of the mystery in which he believed himself compelled to shroud his previous career. Their discourse rarely touched upon the warmer sentiments. It was purely friendly, and slightly formal when most at ease.

There were young men who had been her early playmates, the sons of families of the neighborhood, whom she addressed by their first names, and with whom she sometimes even romped a little. Detmold envied them this frank and careless daylight of publicity, shining through lives that had nothing to conceal.

Then came the departure for Europe. It was rather suddenly resolved upon, and brought up standing all his vague fancies and desires. Alice was to travel with friends from another city and pursue artistic studies, as well as might be, in London, Dresden, and Rome. In the following year her parents were to join her. In the last moments previous to her departure, the usual causes which sealed the lips of Detmold were reinforced by others. Had he chosen to speak then, as in his pain at losing her he could hardly refrain from doing, it is probable that in the excitement of the preparations and her vivid anticipations of the novel pleasures awaiting her his application would have met with less than ordinary consideration. He sent her flowers and also a pretty color brush with a silver handle, of which she made use in her studies, where it stood him in good stead as a memento.

She sailed away with the impression that he was simply one of a large number of people who had been kind to her, and to whom she was very much obliged. Nothing had transpired especially to distinguish him from the rest. In a round of new experiences she forgot him a thousand times for one that she thought of him.

Detmold saw the train bear her away upon the track, which seemed to lengthen out in limitless perspective, converging at last in the Eternal City, and then turned back to his affairs with a heavy heart. He ventured, after a time, to write to her. He would have had the words of his letter convey, if possible, more than their unaided meanings, — something tender and intense which he did not dare to say. In reality it was a guarded and respectful letter, from which nothing could have been inferred but a moderate friendship. Her reply, after a considerable delay, was a pretty note, containing some mention of her journeys, the people she had met, and her delight with everything foreign, — the whole in a hand of such size that a large consumption of paper was involved in the telling of very little. There were one or two more letters on each side, Alice always withholding her replies a length of time which showed that the correspondence was not, with her, of an irresistibly engrossing nature.

Detmold heard much of her movements from her family, — her excursions to Hampton Court and to Windsor, her meetings with other travelers from Lakeport, the delights of Parisian shopping and the Louvre galleries, the strangeness of the hotels and pensions, the grandeur of the Alps, and the Florentine jewelry. Her presence amid these ancient and picturesque localities gave them in Detmold’s estimation a warmth and inner brightness. They assumed a luminous quality which shone across the ocean and struck upon the retina of hiss imagination.

Nearly a year had elapsed; another spring was at hand, and the Stanfields talked of their approaching departure. One day, after listening to their plans, an idea came to Detmold and moved him as if by sudden inspiration. It seemed to lift at last the embargo which a cruel destiny had placed upon his happiness. It was the reflection that it was possible to woo and win Alice beyond the seas, where the obstacles that were here so fatally potent had no existence. There his secret was not known. He could divine no source from which it could be disclosed. Such an account of his family as he might choose to give, provided the confidence and affection of Alice were secured, would be accepted. With her own near friends abroad also, there would be no one in a position to prosecute inquiries about his antecedents, even if disposed. As a traveler, the situation of his fortune, furthermore, was less open to question. The traveler who has wherewithal to pay his reckoning is for the time being on a par with the most opulent of the company.

Detmold deliberately purposed to marry Alice abroad if it were a possible thing. From such a purpose, with its after consequences, he had once shrunk as if from the perpetration of a cruelty. Did his adoption of it now indicate a decadence to a lower moral plane? Perhaps it was, under the stimulus of a dearly cherished desire, only the result of an increased trust in his own powers and in the favorable contingencies of the future. Decadence or not, it was an impetuous reaction. Had he not suffered long enough ? It was a passionate resolve to he happy.

Circumstances favored his design. During the winter his father, who had met with some reverses in his affairs and perhaps feared worse, settled upon him, unsolicited, a few thousand dollars, determined that so much, at least, should be beyond the possibility of loss. It was this money that enabled him, contrary to the best judgment of the giver, to yield to the absorbing desire by which he was possessed. He wrote to Alice before he sailed, announcing his proposed journey, and expressing the hope that in the course of it he might have the good fortune to see her. In this letter, for the first time, he made a reference to his family and birthplace. He spoke of his mother, whom he tenderly loved, who had died some months before; of the advancing age of his father, and his goodness to him (Detmold); and of the little city and its progress, which he was confidently expecting, he said, would shortly make a few suburban acres he owned there preferable to corner lots in New York or San Francisco.

Such a mention, which might have been the most natural thing in the world from another, seemed to him, because of its lifting the weight of his immense reticence, something extraordinary. Why, she would ask, should he write to her of his family and his property, unless — Ah, yes, she would infer. He looked upon this letter as almost tantamount to a declaration. But all of its expressions were platonic and respectful. The most acute person could never have divined from it that the writer was setting off upon a journey of half the circumference of the globe, almost solely for the purpose of finding the young woman thus temperately addressed.

IV.

HIS JOURNEY.

High upon the backs of the sturdy ocean currents moved the tall steamer. Now a swirling chaos enveloped her, and again she traversed a surface scarcely vexed by a ripple. On days of calm, the life-boats and their tackle, the spars, smoke-stacks, awnings, the officer patrolling his bridge, the leadsman with his plumb, the spider-lines of the railings, every common object, projected against the azure field, was poetized. The sailors swung their weight upon the braces with fantastic measured chants. At times sea and sky blended without an outline, and the voyagers seemed pursuing their course with a sedate motion, in trackless space.

Detmold was separated by a waste of waters from the past, —from his secret and its embarrassments. His habitual inquietude was greatly soothed. He was moving towards a world of beauty and romance, in the midst of which bloomed a dear and charming figure surpassed in none of its traditions. Upon disembarking he proceeded without haste to the meeting with Alice. It added a fuller zest to every pleasure that a greater was in store whenever he chose to claim it. Besides, it was important to have seen something first, in order to talk intelligently with her. He reveled in the quaintness of Chester and Oxford, and even permitted himself some pedestrian excursions upon the foot-paths of Coventry, Warwick, and Stratford. The park-like country was in the first green of spring; lilac and hawthorn burdened the air with their fragrance.

There were always reminiscences of her. At Windsor the royal standard floated from the keep, as she had noted in her letter. At the school in London, where she had passed some time, he saw the Italian model dilated upon as a paragon of manly beauty. Detmold thought him a shock-headed, spindling young fellow, about whom, posing idly in an apartment full of energetic young women, there seemed something abnormal. He lingered some days amid the time-eaten masses of picturesqueness at Rouen. He sailed down the Seine to La Bouille, past the red and white villages, the orchards, the châteaux at the ends of formal avenues, the soldiers in sentry-boxes by the road, the meadows bordered with poplars which cast grayish-green reflections upon the silvery water, as in the canvases of Corot. Early in May he took his seat in a railway coach for Paris. He had seen in the journals that devote themselves to the doings of English and American travelers something of the movements of Alice. She had left Rome, with her party, after Easter, and was in Paris by the middle of April. The result of Detmold’s reflections was a determination to make his proposal to Alice at the earliest feasible moment. It was quite uncertain when a period would be put to her sojourn abroad. True, her family were to join her, — their places by the steamer were already taken when he left, — and he knew that Alice had expressed a desire to remain another year. But nothing was certain: she might be ill, or called home by some unlooked-for event; the active temperament of her father would perhaps weary of sight - seeing after a few months, and she would be likely to return with him. Detmold could not expect to be invited to accompany her party in their travels, and to follow them about would create an unpleasant impression. All the arguments, therefore, counseled immediate action. The most favorable answer he dared expect was a promise to take time to deliberate. If it was to be unfavorable, the sooner it was over the better. Even if he was accepted there would need to be a considerable interval before the wedding, if indeed a wedding was to be thought of in Europe at all; but he relied for success, when it should come to this point, on the efficacy of an appeal to Alice’s sense of romance, and on his own purpose, which he would then urge, of remaining abroad to engage in architectural studies. He made no doubt that from his letters, especially from the last, Alice was pretty well aware of his state of mind, and must have given to him and his intentions, and her own disposition in the matter, ample reflection.

In many a reverie of the ocean passage he tried to picture the circumstances under which the momentous declaration would be made. Perhaps it would be in some old gallery, over the treasures of which their admiration had kindled in common; perhaps by some ruin in mellow twilight; perhaps while driving on the shore of some beautiful lake, or floating in the evening upon its depths; perhaps on the veranda of some chalêt hotel, after a hard day’s climb in the mountains. How should he phrase his speech to her? But such an artificial preparation seemed a desecration. All must be left to the impulse of the moment. She would be shy, she would refuse, she would hesitate, relent. Doubtless, if the poets be accurate in their accounts, a divine afflatus would take possession of him; he would talk and act under the influence of an inspiration which would destroy every obstacle and every shade of constraint. She was as precious to him — he loved her as dearly as the most ardent of the heroes of these poets their heroines. If this condition were fulfilled, why should any of the others be lacking? It was not to be expected that she should love him at the very start; he did not deserve anything of the sort. He was to win her affection by degrees, —by being very good to her, — by a life-long devotion, until it was all his.

As he drew near to Paris his journey, which had acted hitherto as a sedative, had now rather the effect of an insufficient anodyne upon a patient in fever. It stimulated instead of allaying. His heart beat violently at times. His agitation increased with each mile. It was his constitutional habit to dread the worst, and his fears now returned with redoubled force.

The train rolled into the Gare de I’Ouest shortly after noon, and he was in the heart of Paris. The activity of his mind developed in many directions an unnatural acuteness. He comprehended things intuitively, and spoke the language during these first few days better than ever afterwards. Waiting only to transfer his baggage to his hotel in the Rue St. Honoré, he hurried to the banker’s for letters. There was a note from Alice, — in accordance with a request he had made her before sailing, — sent some time before from Rome and containing her address, nothing more. It was at a pension in the Rue Bassano. He thought it best to apprise her of his arrival. He sent a note by a commissionaire, saying that he had brought some small articles from her family and wished to do himself the honor to present them. Mademoiselle was not at home, and no answer was returned. He did not call the same evening but waited till the next. He devoted the interval to obtaining a preliminary idea of Paris. In twentyfour hours he had been, by all sorts of conveyances, in every part of it, from Montmartre to Montrouge, and from Bercy to Auteuil.

The following evening, in Londonmade clothes, of unusual becomingness, he went up the wide and animated avenue of the Champs Élysées to the Rue Bassano. There were several persons in the drawing-room of the pension. He scrutinized them curiously, and wished he could divine their relations to Alice. There were among the rest two young men, evidently inmates, whom he regarded with respect and hatred. Alice kept him waiting a few moments, and then rustled down in a charming toilette. The entrance to the drawing-room was by a central door. She balanced an instant upon the threshold, scanning the room, and then saw him and came forward with a pleasant greeting. Her identity and naturalness among all the strange accessories impressed him with a feeling as when one finds the face of a friend gazing out familiarly from an album picked up in some remote and incongruous place.

She talked pleasantly of her travels and adventures. Sometimes she stopped abruptly in the midst of a recital to asseverate that she would not utter another syllable until she had heard fuller details of Lakeport and her friends. Detmold found his agitation succeeded by ease and a sense of restfulness. He basked in her presence as in a delightful temperature.

She presented him to some of the persons he had speculated about, — they were chiefly ladies of an elderly or uncertain age, who seemed to be arbiters of their own destiny and to carry life very much in a satchel, — and to Madame the proprietress. Although these persons in turn, after engaging in a short conversation, went about their business to other parts of the room, there was little or no privacy left to Alice and Detmold. The provoking aspect of this was that it seemed to be of her own contriving. Detmold was to learn that there is a difference between American and Continental customs, and that it was the pleasure of Alice to subscribe to those among which she found herself. They included chaperonage, which rests upon the doctrine of the inherent unfitness of young women to be left alone. It would by no means do, under the eyes of the keen observers by whom she was surrounded, to fashion her conduct towards Detmold according to the provincial standards of Lakeport. There began to be speculations already as to whether the young man who talked to her so earnestly were not perhaps a lover pursuing her against the approbation of her parents — with whom she might possibly be preparing to elope.

She replied to the invitations which he pressed upon her at first, “It is not the custom.”

He tried to rally her, and represented her subservience as evidence of a serious decline in patriotism.

“ Let me remind you that your home is in the setting sun, Miss Alice,” he said, lightly. “ We ought to impose our fashions upon foreigners instead of adopting theirs. The effete despots of Europe undoubtedly rejoice with fiendish glee at our truckling to them, and Freedom shrieks every time she notices it.”

“ It is very likely, but, that does not make it any the easier when you are in Rome to avoid doing as the rest of the Romans do.”

“ Then you cannot drive with me? ”

“No.” ’

“Nor walk? ”

She gave a little negative shake of the head.

“ Nor go with me to any of the theatres, nor even to the panorama? ”

Another negative movement, with a deprecating smile.

Mrs. Mason Russell, of Lakeport, with her pretty daughter of thirteen, for the education of whom she was ostensibly residing abroad, entered the room. She came and joined them, and the interview was permanently interrupted. It was plain that Alice was a favorite. The child nestled by her on a sofa and put her arm about her. Alice was one of those slowly developing natures that remain young, if not always, at least long after their contemporaries. It might have been a constitutional trait in her that, although essentially feminine, she had been notably indifferent towards the other sex. As a young girl she had been content to make her plans of enjoyment with girls, without a thought that other companionship was to be desired. She had run away from her juvenile admirers, and later on had received even formal advances with puzzling and impolite treatment, the consequences of which it had sometimes taken all the tact of her sagacious mamma to repair. She was now at the age of twenty-seven. The full treasure of her affection, if treasure there were, was still in reserve, to be Lavished upon him who should at last meet with the favor of her capricious choice.

As the youngest of many children she had been kept a good deal in leadingstrings, and favored with liberal installments of what her mamma termed “ sensible notions.” In her childhood she had not been pretty. She had come to an apprehension of her own attractiveness slowly and with incredulity. It was some such causes as these, when Detmold first met her, that mingled a trace of simplicity and even diffidence in her manners, the more pleasing because it would never have been looked for in so radiant a figure.

Her residence of fourteen months abroad, with its freedom from the too searching criticisms of a large family circle, its demands for independent action, and its frequent contact with strangers, who had without exception found her charming and had taken little pains to conceal it, had not been without results. It had increased her self-reliance and perhaps added a touch of coquetry which Detmold, exerted as it was at his own expense, would not have spared any more than any other of the numberless items that went to make up the sum total of a wholly adorable composition.

During a fortnight in Paris he was baffled in every attempt to make the avowal with which his whole nature was burdened. He scarcely slept ; at the table there was a choking in his throat, which refused food, and his heart acted abnormally. The first evening with her was not an unfavorable specimen of his experience throughout. Call when he would there were always others present. He went once with a party from the pension, by Mrs. Russell’s invitation, by one of the miniature river steamers, the bateaux-mouches, to St. Cloud and the porcelain works of Sèvres. Again, they visited the Gobelin tapestries. Again, to obtain an insight into the amusements of less fashionable Paris, an evening was spent at a summer garden on the point of the island at the bridge of Henri Quatre. From this evening he hoped much. Perhaps Alice would stroll apart with him to watch the rush of the water by the parapets, or would be separated from the others involuntarily in the obscurity. But neither on this occasion nor any other was there afforded the slightest opening corresponding to his hopes.

Had Alice, then, already decided his case adversely? The inference would not be warranted while it was uncertain that her management to avoid being left alone with Detmold was not due to exaggerated deference to new standards of propriety, or to diffidence or coquetry, or indeed that there was management at all on her part, or anything further than the operation of the most ordinary fatalities. Should he postpone his purpose? What more favorable prospect offered either elsewhere or in the future?

Accident at length afforded an Opportunity of which, unpropitious as it was, he availed himself. Instead of the fading twilights and tender seclusions he had pictured, it was the open street and glaring daylight. He encountered Alice returning alone to the Rue Bassano. She had been making some purchases in a shop on the grand avenue near by, with a companion who had been enticed away by others upon some small expedition which she did not care to join.

The young man asked leave to join her. She granted it with some nervousness. It is not certain that his purpose had been hitherto divined. If it had at all, it was only in the form of an improbable surmise, based upon his conduct during this period rather than upon anything in the past. His letters, in the efficacy of which he had so trustingly confided, had conveyed nothing. But now, before a word was spoken, it impressed itself upon her as if it radiated from him in tangible form. He would not have wondered if it had. It seemed to him to fill the atmosphere so that pedestrians blocks away might have been sensible of it.

Alice would have given much to avoid what was coming. She had never thought of him as a lover. She liked and respected him well enough, but no impulse moved her strongly either for or against him. How could she know that he was the husband she would desire and whom she supposed she was destined in the ordinary course of things to have ! She was alone, too, in a strange world, without the point of support afforded by the presence of her family. She was not sure that she wished absolutely to refuse, but she could not by encouragement commit herself to future complications which might prove unwelcome. She was sensible of extreme embarrassment. The time and place added to it.

Detmold made an ardent beginning. He said that he had always loved her, and that he had come to Europe expressly upon this mission, because he could not keep away from her influence. Alice involuntarily quickened her step for an instant, when the subject was broached, then slackened it. Her replies were given in the most chilling monosyllables.

She must have had some idea of his feeling towards her. “ Not the least.”

Finding her so cold, he believed that he was mortally offending her. He floundered in his speech; his words deserted him. How impertinent was not this lavishing of endearments if there were no responsive chord within her to which it appealed! They walked for some moments in silence; such a situation alone was defeat. Then he urged her gently for an answer, — to give him some hope, if not now, for the future, no matter how remote — some fragment —

“ No, I cannot.”

The tone was curt, even harsh, yet she could not for her life have made it different. They proceeded the rest of the short way in silence. As they parted she asked, as an effort at politeness, if they — her party — should see him again. He was going to Italy, he said, and they should probably never meet again. What could it matter? He turned partly away, and then extended his hand and said good - by. She placed hers in it. He raised it and pressed it to his lips.

The slight, surprised effort she made to withdraw it tightened its clasp for an instant in his. It was with the thrill of this pressure, warm in the memories of both, that Alice mounted the stairs of her pension, flushed and perturbed, and Detmold went away to Verona, utterly routed aud cut to pieces in his plans.

A feeling of immense loneliness came over him. The strange surroundings in which he knew no living soul, the thousands of miles of distance between him and his country, seemed as nothing to this fatal abandonment by the one person in all the world upon whom his hopes of happiness rested.

W. H. Bishop.