“Very few, Miriam, and Claude Bainrothe is not unlike the majority of his fellows.  Men count it no wrong to deceive women.”

“O Evelyn, you are too severe, I think.  Why seek to shake my confidence in the man I love?  He did not happen to suit your fancy, and you rejected him.  I took what you cast aside, humbly, thankfully, dear Evelyn.  Why resent this, and scorn me for my humility?  Let not your pride for me make you unjust toward him.  You, of all women, can best afford to be generous to Claude Bainrothe.”

But still the cold shadow veiled her face, and still she looked inauspiciously on our betrothal, which, owing to our youth, it was understood, should continue a year.  In the interval I was to travel with my father to the different large cities of the Union which I had never seen, and abide awhile in Washington.

His health, Dr. Pemberton thought, required this change, but a darker one was in store for him.

On Christmas-day, of that year, he was smitten with paralysis, and his decline was sure and rapid from that hour.  Let me pass over the agony of that period of six weeks, lengthened into years by the dread tension of anxiety, most relentless of the furies.  But for the confidence I felt in Claude’s affection, and the vista of hope it opened for me, I think I should have succumbed under the unequal struggle.

During this period, his attentions to me and to my helpless father were most kind and assiduous.  Mr. Bainrothe and Evelyn, too, between whom some unexplained alienation had existed for some time, met in apparent harmony above his bed of death.

In addition to the services of our own dear and valued physician, we had others of eminence coming and going daily, with the knowledge in their own breasts that all was vain.

Still I never ceased entirely to hope until the very last.  “He is not old, he is still vigorous,” I would say to myself.  “There may be—­there must be—­reaction.  I have so often heard him boast of his English constitution, I cannot, oh, I cannot think that the end is yet!”

I wondered then at the inattention of the Stanburys, in whose disinterested friendship I had reposed so much confidence, even though a shadow of late had been thrown over our intercourse by my engagement with Claude Bainrothe, a shadow of which I thought I saw the substance in the bitter jealousy and rancorous, unreasonable love and hatred of the morbid George Gaston.

Later I found by the merest accident, through one note of his that had been left in a drawer of a desk long disused, that Mr. Gerald Stanbury and Evelyn had maintained a rather fierce correspondence on the subject of her refusal to accept his services at my father’s pillow; founded, as she alleged, on the recent unexplained but deep-rooted aversion Mr. Monfort seemed to have imbibed for his neighbor and friend, and which his physicians said must be regarded.