anxiety."
"That's what I tell papa," Miss Guion said, warmly, catching the concluding words. "It's a great responsibility and anxiety. He ought to be free from it. I tell him my marriage is a providential hint to him to give up work."
"Perhaps I sha'n't get the chance. Work may give up—me."
"I wish it would, papa. Then everything would be settled."
"Some things would be settled. Others might be opened—for discussion."
If Rodney Temple had not lifted his eyes in another significant look toward Guion, Davenant would have let these sentences pass unheeded. As it was, his attention was directed to possible things, or impossible things, left unsaid. For a second or two he was aware of an odd suspicion, but he brushed it away as absurd, in view of the self-assurance with which Guion roused himself at last to enter into the conversation, which began immediately to turn on persons of whom Davenant had no knowledge.
The inability to follow closely gave him time to make a few superficial observations regarding his host. In spite of the fact that Guion had been a familiar figure to him ever since his boyhood, he now saw him at really close range for the first time in years.
What struck him most was the degree to which Guion conserved his quality of Adonis. Long ago renowned, in that section of American society that clings to the cities and seaboard between Maine and Maryland, as a fine specimen of manhood, he was perhaps handsomer now, with his noble, regular features, his well-trimmed, iron-gray beard, and his splendid head of iron-gray hair, than he had been in his youth. Reckoning roughly, Davenant judged him to be sixty. He had been a personage prominently in view in the group of cities formed by Boston, Cambridge, and Waverton, ever since Davenant could remember him. Nature having created Guion an ornament to his kind, fate had been equally beneficent in ordaining that he should have nothing to do, on leaving the university, but walk into the excellent legal practice his grandfather had founded, and his father had brought to a high degree of honor as well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the younger Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly with the care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage without any rough-and-tumble loss of gentility. It required little or nothing in the way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place, and—especially during the lifetime of the elder partners—left him leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, making it a matter of course that he should figure on the Boards of Galleries of Fine Arts and Colleges of Music, and other institutions meant to minister to his country's good through the elevation of its taste.
"It's the sort of thing he was cut out for," Davenant commented to himself, as his eye traveled from the high-bred face, where refinement blended with authority, to the essentially gentlemanly figure, on which the delicately tied cravat sat with the elegance of an orchid, while the white waistcoat, of the latest and most youthful cut, was as neatly adjusted to the person as the calyx to a bud. The mere sight of so much ease and distinction made Davenant himself feel like a rustic in his Sunday clothes, though he seized the opportunity of being in such company to enlarge his perception of the fine points of bearing. It was an improving experience of a kind which he only occasionally got.
He had an equal sense of the educational value of the conversation, to which, as it skipped from country to country and from one important name to another, it was a privilege to be a listener. His own career—except for his two excursions round the world, conscientiously undertaken in pursuit of knowledge—had been so somberly financial that he was frankly, and somewhat naïvely, curious concerning the people who "did things" bearing little or no relation to business, and who permitted themselves sensations merely for the sake of having them. Olivia Guion's friends, and Drusilla Fane's—admirals, generals, colonels, ambassadors, and secretaries of embassy they apparently were, for the most part—had what seemed to him an unwonted freedom of dramatic action. Merely to hear them talked about gave him glimpses of a world varied and picturesque, from the human point of view, beyond his dreams. In the exchange of scraps of gossip and latest London anecdotes between Miss Guion and Drusilla Fane, on which Henry Guion commented, Davenant felt himself to be looking at a vivid but fitfully working cinematograph, of which the scenes were snatched at random from life as lived anywhere between Washington and Simla, or Inverness and Rome. The effect was both instructive and entertaining. It was also in its way enlightening, since it showed him the true standing in the world of this woman whom he had once, for a few wild minutes, hoped to make his wife.
The dinner was half over before he began clearly to detach Miss Guion from that environment which he would have called "the best Boston society." Placing her there, he would have said before this evening that he placed her as high as the reasonable human being could aspire to be set. For any one whose roots were in Waverton, "the best Boston society" would in general be taken as the state of blossoming. It came to him as a discovery, made there and then, that Olivia Guion had seized this elect state with one of her earliest tendrils, and, climbing on by way of New York and Washington, had chosen to do her actual flowering in a cosmopolitan air.
He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor, how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already how well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.
This perception of his own inward applause explained something in regard to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the beginning of dinner—the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to see another man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated. He saw now that it was a field on which he never could have won. Within "the best Boston society" he might have had a chance, though even there it must have been a poor one; but out here in the open, so to speak, where the prowess and chivalry of Christendom furnished his competitors, he had been as little in the running as a mortal at a contest of the gods. That he was no longer in love with her he had known years ago; but it palliated somewhat his old humiliation, it made the word failure easier to swallow down, to perceive that his love, when it existed, had been doomed, from the nature of things and in advance, to end in nothing, like that of the nightingale for the moon.
By dwelling too pensively on these thoughts he found he had missed some of the turns of the talk, his attention awakening to hear Henry Guion say:
"That's all very fine, but a man doesn't risk everything he holds dear in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it. You may depend upon it he had a reason."
"Oh, he had a reason," Mrs. Fane agreed—"the reason of being hard up. The trouble lay in its not being good enough."
"I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil."
"But not for any one else. He was drummed out. There wasn't a soul in the regiment to speak to him. We heard that he took another name and went abroad. Anyhow, he disappeared. It was all he could do. He was lucky to get off with that; wasn't he, Peter? wasn't he, father?"
"What he got off with," said Guion, "was a quality of tragic interest which never pertains to the people who stick to the Street called Straight."
"Oh, certainly," Mrs. Fane assented, dryly. "He did acquire that. But I'm surprised to hear you commend it; aren't you, father? aren't you, Peter?"
"I'm not commending it," Guion asserted; "I only feel its force. I've a great deal of sympathy with any poor beggar in his—downfall."
"Since
