CHAPTER XXIII

I had no opportunity now to tell Douglas that I had found Zoe.  Her own injunctions to keep her whereabouts a secret appealed to me.  Perhaps her going away, the changing of her name, her determination to keep her life free from mine, made for a real solution.  Perhaps she could continue in this way for years, taking from me what I might send her.  Perhaps I could marry Dorothy eventually.  Perhaps all would be well.  Perhaps!

When we were driving toward Springfield the next day I was on the point several times of telling Douglas that I had found Zoe.  I wanted to discuss the possibilities with some one.  Prudence, however, dictated silence—­and silence I kept.

Mr. Williams was a prospering lawyer and land speculator.  He had been in Chicago for two years.  His household consisted of Mrs. Williams and two children, and a Miss Walker from Connecticut, a sister of Mrs. Williams.  The house was new and of some architectural pretentions, of brick, in the style of the houses I had seen in New York.  It was well furnished.  There were two servants; altogether an air of elegance about the establishment.

We had a gay hour at breakfast, for Douglas was in one of his most engaging and talkative moods.  Mr. Williams was a man in the middle forties, and seemed colorless and unschooled in comparison with Douglas.  He shared Douglas’ political opinions, looked upon him with a certain awe; while Mrs. Williams and the children kept a reverential silence.

But Miss Walker!  I saw that she was disposed to match wits with Douglas.  She was exceedingly fair of complexion, with lovely brown hair and gray-blue eyes, which had a way of fixing themselves in an expression of intense concentration.  Like sudden spurts of flame they lighted quickly upon the barely suggested point of a story or an argument.  She laughed freely in a musical voice that encouraged Douglas to multiply anecdotes.  Douglas enjoyed this admiration.  But after all his attitude toward women was wholly conventional.  He did not use his gifts to win them.  The idea of making conquests, even through his growing celebrity, did not enter into his speculations.  He was a man’s man.  If he was ever to be interested in a woman it would be in the practical way of making her his wife.  He could be a husband, never a lover.  His genius, though fed by passion and virility, entertained no visions of romantic ecstasy.  His instinct was for the laws.

Miss Walker was to Douglas only a delightful auditor, an apt interlocutor.  She looked Douglas through and through.  She dropped words of dissent.  She expressed her abhorrence of slavery and the South.  In referring to South Carolina’s attempted nullification of the tariff law, she said that if they ever attempted to secede they should be pushed out of the door and not held.  I thought her critical of Douglas, in spite of the amazement which her eyes betrayed for