Up to this minute he had seemed to withdraw from her, to elude her.  As a matter of fact, though she spoke of him rarely and always with a purposely prosaic touch, he was so romantic a figure in her dreams that the approach of the sordid and the ugly had dispelled his image.  It was quite true, as she had said to Drusilla Fane, that from one point of view she didn’t know him very well.  She might have said that she didn’t know him at all on any of those planes where rents and the price of beef are factors.  He had come into her life with much the same sort of appeal as the wandering knight of the days of chivalry made to the damsel in the family fortress.  Up to his appearing she had thought herself too sophisticated and too old to be caught by this kind of fancy, especially as it was not the first time she had been exposed to it.  In the person of Rupert Ashley, however, it presented itself with the requisite limitations and accompaniments.  He was neither so young nor so rich nor of such high rank as to bring a disproportionate element into their romance, while at the same time he had all the endowments of looks, birth, and legendary courage that the heroine craves in the hero.  When he was not actually under her eyes, her imagination embodied him most easily in the svelte elegance of the King Arthur beside Maximilian’s tomb at Innspruck.

Their acquaintance had been brief, but illuminating—­one of those friendships that can afford to transcend the knowledge of mere outward personal facts to leap to the things of the heart and the spirit.  It was one of the commonplaces of their intimate speech together that they “seemed to have known each other always”; but now that it was necessary for her to possess some practical measure of his character, she saw, with a sinking of the heart, that they had never passed beyond the stage of the poetic and pictorial.

Speculating as to what he would say when he received her letter telling of her father’s misfortunes, she was obliged to confess that she “had not the remotest idea.”  Matters of this sort belonged to a world on which they had deliberately turned their backs.  That is to say, she had turned her back on it deliberately, though by training knowing its importance, fearing that to him it would seem mundane, inappropriate, American.  This course had been well enough during the period of a high-bred courtship, almost too fastidiously disdainful of the commonplace; but now that the Fairy Princess had become a beggar-maid, while Prince Charming was Prince Charming still, it was natural that the former should recognize its insufficiency.  She had recognized it fully yesterday; but this morning, in the optimistic brightness of the golden atmosphere, romance came suddenly to life again and confidence grew strong.  Drusilla had said that she, Olivia, knew him well enough to be sure that he would want to do—­everything right.  They would do everything right—­together.  They would save her father whom she loved so tenderly, from making rash mistakes, and—­who knew?—­find a way, perhaps, to rescue him in his troubles and shelter his old age.