The bruise over John’s left eye was fading out, but traces of his spiritual battle were deepening.  During the visit which he had paid (under compulsion, I am sure) to Juno at our boarding-house in company with Miss Josephine St. Michael, his recent financial triumph at the bedside had filled his face with diabolic elation as he confronted his victim’s enraged but checkmated aunt; when to the thinly veiled venom of her inquiry as to a bridegroom’s health he had retorted with venom as thinly veiled that he was feeling better that night than for many weeks, he had looked better, too; the ladies had exclaimed after his departure what a handsome young man he was, and Juno had remarked how fervently she trusted that marriage might cure him of his deplorable tendencies.  But to-day his vitality had sagged off beneath the weight of his preoccupation:  it looked to me as if, by a day or two more, the boy’s face might be grown haggard.

Whether by intention, or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more friendly and confidential.  He did not reveal this by imparting any confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated the ease he had come to feel in my company.  Upon our last memorable interview he had embarked at once upon a hasty yet evidently predetermined course of talk, because he feared that I might touch upon subjects which he wished excluded from all discussion between us; to-day he embarked upon nothing, made no conventional effort of any sort, but walked beside me, content with my mere society; if it should happen that either of us found a thought worth expressing aloud, good! and if this should not happen, why, good also!  And so we walked mutely and agreeably together for a long while.  The thought which was growing clear in my mind, and which was decidedly worthy of expression, was also unluckily one which his new reliance upon my discretion completely forbade my uttering in even the most shadowy manner; but it was a conviction which Miss Josephine St. Michael should have been quick to force upon him for his good.  Quite apart from selfish reasons, he had no right to marry a girl whom he had ceased to care for.  The code which held a “gentleman” to his plighted troth in such a case did more injury to the “lady” than any “jilting” could possibly do.  Never until now had I thought this out so lucidly, and I was determined that time and my own tact should assuredly help me find a way to say it to him, if he continued in his present course.

“Daddy Ben says you can’t be a real Northerner.”

This was his first observation, and I think that we must have walked a mile before he made it.

“Because I pounded a negro?  Of course, he retains your Southern ante-bellum mythical notion of Northerners—­all of us willing to have them marry our sisters.  Well, there’s a lady at our boarding-house who says you are a real gambler.”