“Wouldn’t you ride to-morrow?”

“No; I have some old-fashioned notions about Sunday.  You have been abroad too long, perhaps, to appreciate them.”

“I appreciate fidelity to conscience, Madge.”

They had their supper together again as on the evening before, but Madge was carelessly languid and fitful in her mirthful sallies, and complained of over-fatigue.  “I won’t come down again to-night,” she said to Graydon as they passed out of the supper-room.  “Good-night.”

“Good-night, Madge,” he replied, taking her hand in both his own.  “I understand you now, and know that you have gone beyond even your superb strength to-day.  Sleep the sleep of the justest and truest little woman that ever breathed.  I can’t tell you how much you have added to my happiness during the past two days.”

“He understands me!” she muttered, as she closed the door of her room.  “I am almost tempted to doubt whether a merciful God understands me.  Why was this immeasurable love put into my heart to be so cruelly thwarted?  Why must he go blindly on to so cruel a fate?  Of course she’ll renounce everything for him.  Whatever else she may be, she is not an idiot.”

Henry Muir’s quiet eyes had observed Madge closely, and from a little distance he had seen the parting between her and his brother.  Then he saw Graydon seek Miss Wildmere and resume a manner which he had learned to detest, and the self-contained man went out upon the grounds, and said, through clinched teeth:  “To think that there should have been such a fool bearing the name of Muir!  He’s been gushing to Madge about that speculator, and we shall yet have to take her as we would an infection.”

CHAPTER XXIII

THE FILIAL MARTYR

Miss Wildmere appeared in one of her most brilliant moods that evening.  There was a dash of excitement, almost recklessness, in her gray eyes.  She and Mr. Arnault had been deputed to lead the German, but she took Graydon out so often as to produce in Mr. Arnault’s eyes an expression which the observant Mr. Wildmere did not like at all.  He had just returned from dreary, half-deserted Wall Street, which was as dead and hopeless as only that region of galvanic life can be at times.  He had neither sold nor bought stock, but had moused around, with the skill of an old habitue, for information concerning the eligibility of the two men who were seeking his daughter’s hand.  In the midsummer dullness and holiday stagnation the impending operation in the Catskills was the only one that promised anything whatever.  He became more fully satisfied that Arnault’s firm was prospering.  They had been persistent “bears” on a market that had long been declining, and had reaped a golden harvest from the miseries of others.  On the other hand, he learned that Henry Muir was barely holding his own, and that he had strained his credit dangerously to