A week went by; two weeks—­three, and still twice a day he continued to march to and from the park with his charges.  The faces of all the nurse-maids and others who frequented the big parallelogram of green became familiar to him; he learned to know by sight the people who rode in the park and had a distant acquaintance with the squirrels.

He became, for the first time, aware one day, from the perusal of a certain newspaper he always purchased now, that the prince had returned to Russia.  Although Miss Dalrymple refused to be interviewed, or to confirm or deny any statement, it was generally understood (convenient phrase!) that the wedding would take place in the fall at the old Van Rolsen home.  The prince had left America in his yacht—­the Nevski—­for St. Petersburg, announced the society editor.  After a special interview with the czar and a few necessary business arrangements, the nobleman would return at once for his bride.  And, perhaps, he—­Mr. Heatherbloom—­would still be at his post of duty at the Van Rolsen house!

Since the day the prince had been with Miss Dalrymple in the conservatory, Mr. Heatherbloom had not seen, or rather heard, that gentleman at the house.  But then he—­Mr. Heatherbloom—­belonged in the rear, and, no doubt, the prince had continued to be a daily, or twice, or three-times-a-day visitor to Miss Van Rolsen’s elegant, if somewhat stiff, reception rooms.  Now, however, he would come no more until he came finally to “take with him the bride—­”

The thought was in Horatio’s mind when for a third time he encountered her, face to face, on a landing, near a stair, or somewhere in the house, he couldn’t afterward just exactly recall where, only that she looked through him, without recognition, speech or movement of an eyelash, as if he had been a thing of thin air!  But a thing that became suddenly imbued with real life; inspired with purpose!  She had permitted him to remain in the house, knowing his professed helplessness in the matter—­she must have divined that—­playing with him as a tigress with a victim (yes; a tigress!  Mr. Heatherbloom wildly, on the spur of the moment, compared her in his mind to that fierce beautiful creature).  He would force her to tell him to go; she would certainly not suffer him to remain there another day if he told her—­

“Miss Dalrymple, there is something I ought to say.  I could not help overhearing you and the prince, one day, several weeks ago, in the conservatory.”

After he said it, he asked himself what excuse he had for saying it.  If he had stopped to analyze the impulse, he would have seen how absurd, unreasonable and uncalled for his words were.  But he had no time to analyze; like a diver who plunges suddenly, on some mad impulse, into a whirlpool, he had cast himself into the vortex.