Chapter VI: Part 6

"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."