But when the good lady openly attacked him, and said,

“Arthur, how can you?  What will people think?  Why don’t you go to church?”

Arthur replied, with entire coolness,

“Aunt Winnifred, what’s the use of going to church when Van Boozenberg goes, and is not in the least discomposed?  I’m afraid of the morality of such a place!”

Aunt Winnifred’s eyes dilated with horror.  She had no argument to throw at Arthur in return, and that reckless fellow always had to help her out.

“However, dear aunt, you go; and I suppose you ought to be quite as good a reason for going as Van Boozenberg for staying away.”

After such a conversation it fairly rained tracts in Arthur’s room.  The shower was only the signal for fresh hostilities upon his part; but for all the hostility Aunt Winnifred was not able to believe her nephew to be a very bad young man.

As he and his friends passed up Broadway toward Chambers Street they met Abel Newt hastening down to Bunker’s to accompany Miss Plumer to Grace Church.  The young man had bathed and entirely refreshed himself during the hour or two since he had stepped out of Thiel’s.  There was not a better-dressed man upon Broadway; and many a hospitable feminine eye opened to entertain him as long and as much as possible as he passed by.  He had an unusual flush in his cheek and spring in his step.  Perhaps he was excited by the novelty of mixing in a throng of church-goers.  He had not done such a thing since on summer Sunday mornings he used to stroll with the other boys along the broad village road, skirted with straggling houses, to Dr. Peewee’s.  Heavens! in what year was that? he thought, unconsciously.  Am I a hundred years old?  On those mornings he used to see—­Precisely the person he saw at the moment the thought crossed his mind—­Hope Wayne—­who bowed to him as he passed her party.  How much calmer, statelier, and more softly superior she was than in those old Delafield days!

She remembered, too; and as the lithe, graceful figure of the handsome and fascinating Mr. Abel Newt bent in passing, Arthur Merlin, who felt, at the instant Abel passed, as if his own feet were very large, and his clothes ugly, and his movement stupidly awkward—­felt, in fact, as if he looked like a booby—­Arthur Merlin observed that his companion went on speaking, that she did not change color, and that her voice was neither hurried nor confused.

Why did the young painter, as he observed these little things, feel as if the sun shone with unusual splendor?  Why did he think he had never heard a bird sing so sweetly as one that hung at an open window they passed?  Nay, why in that moment was he almost willing to paint Abel Newt as the Endymion of his great picture?

CHAPTER XLV.

IN CHURCH.