He jealously watched her social progress, and he contributed not a little toward it.  He had a sense of proprietorship in her, and he did not mean that she should be just one among many; he wished her to be a great luminary around which lesser lights revolved.  Under Marcia Vandervelde’s wing, then, Mrs. Peter Champneys was launched, and from the very first she was a success.  She played her part beautifully, though she was curiously apathetic about her triumphs.  The incense of adulation did not make as sweet an odor in her nostrils as one might have supposed.  Anne Champneys was oddly lacking in personal vanity, and she retained her sense of values, she was able to see things in their just proportions.  That she had created a sensation didn’t turn her red head.  But she had a feeling that she had, in a sense, kept her word to Chadwick Champneys, discharged part of her debt.  This was what he had wished her to accomplish.  Very well, she had accomplished it.  She was glad.  But she sensed a certain hollowness under it all.  Sometimes, alone in her room, she would stand and look long and earnestly at the red Indian face of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, brought from Florence and now hanging on her wall.  That room had changed.  It was plain and simple, almost austere; the “honest monk” who had died in the fire, and the wooden crucifix under him, seemed to dominate it.  That treasure of a maid whom Marcia had secured for her, secretly sniffed at Mrs. Champneys’s bed-chamber.  She couldn’t understand it.  It wasn’t in keeping with the rest of the house.  For, it was a brilliant house, as the home of an exceedingly fashionable, wealthy, and handsome woman should be.

Anne bore the name of Champneys like a conquering banner.  What had happened on a smaller scale in Florence, happened on a large scale here at home.  Something of the Champneys story had crept out,—­the early marriage, which had kept all the wealth in the family; the departure of the bridegroom to become an artist, and the fact that he had really become a noted one.  The halo of romance encircled her head.  She was considered beautiful and clever, and the glamour of much money added to the impression she created; but she was also considered cold, inaccessible, and perhaps, as the Italian had said, without a heart.  She became, as Marcia had laughingly predicted, a legend in her own lifetime.

Jason Vandervelde watched her speculatively.  He adored Anne, and he hoped she wasn’t going to be spoiled by all the pother made over her.  And he watched with a growing concern Berkeley Hayden’s quiet, persistent, deliberate pursuit of her.  Jason wasn’t under any illusions about the Champneys marriage, but he had, as his wife said, an almost superstitious respect for Chadwick Champneys, and that marriage had been the old man’s darling plan.  It was upon that he had builded, and Vandervelde hated to see that plan brought to naught.  Anne wouldn’t really lose, of course,—­Hayden