About a year ago there came a whisper—­if the word “whisper” is not too harsh a term to apply to what seemed a mere breath floating gently through the atmosphere of the billiard-room—­imparting the intelligence that Van Twiller was in some kind of trouble.  Just as everybody suddenly takes to wearing square-toed boots, or to drawing his neckscarf through a ring, so it became all at once the fashion, without any preconcerted agreement, for everybody to speak of Van Twiller as a man in some way under a cloud.  But what the cloud was, and how he got under it, and why he did not get away from it, were points that lifted themselves into the realm of pure conjecture.  There was no man in the club with strong enough wing to his imagination to soar to the supposition that Van Twiller was embarrassed in money matters.  Was he in love?  That appeared nearly as improbable; for if he had been in love all the world—­that is, perhaps a hundred first families—­would have known all about it instantly.

“He has the symptoms,” said Delaney, laughing.  “I remember once when Jack Fleming—­”

“Ned!” cried Flemming, “I protest against any allusion to that business.”

This was one night when Van Twiller had wandered into the club, turned over the magazines absently in the reading-room, and wandered out again without speaking ten words.  The most careless eye would have remarked the great change that had come over Van Twiller.  Now and then he would play a game of billiards with De Peyster or Haseltine, or stop to chat a moment in the vestibule with old Duane; but he was an altered man.  When at the club, he was usually to be found in the small smoking-room upstairs, seated on a fauteuil fast asleep, with the last number of “The Nation” in his hand.  Once, if you went to two or three places of an evening, you were certain to meet Van Twiller at them all.  You seldom met him in society now.

By and by came whisper number two—­a whisper more emphatic than number one, but still untraceable to any tangible mouthpiece.  This time the whisper said that Van Twiller was in love.  But with whom?  The list of possible Mrs. Van Twillers was carefully examined by experienced hands, and a check placed against a fine old Knickerbocker name here and there, but nothing satisfactory arrived at.  Then that same still small voice of rumor but now with an easily detected staccato sharpness to it, said that Van Twiller was in love—­with an actress!  Van Twiller, whom it had taken all these years and all this waste of raw material in the way of ancestors to bring to perfection—­Ralph Van Twiller, the net result and flower of his race, the descendant of Wouter, the son of Mrs. Vanrensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller—­in love with an actress!  That was too ridiculous to be believed—­and so everybody believed it.