“It ’s better for me,” smiled Felix.  “But do you know, as regards the sacrifice, that I don’t believe he admired you when this decision was taken quite so much as he had done a fortnight before?”

“He never admired me.  He admires Charlotte; he pitied me.  I know him so well.”

“Well, then, he did n’t pity you so much.”

Gertrude looked at Felix a little, smiling.  “You should n’t permit yourself,” she said, “to diminish the splendor of his action.  He admires Charlotte,” she repeated.

“That’s capital!” said Felix laughingly, and dipping his oars.  I cannot say exactly to which member of Gertrude’s phrase he alluded; but he dipped his oars again, and they kept floating about.

Neither Felix nor his sister, on that day, was present at Mr. Wentworth’s at the evening repast.  The two occupants of the chalet dined together, and the young man informed his companion that his marriage was now an assured fact.  Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of.

Felix looked at her a moment, smiling.  “I hope,” he said, “not to be thrown back on my reason.”

“It is very true,” Eugenia rejoined, “that one’s reason is dismally flat.  It ’s a bed with the mattress removed.”

But the brother and sister, later in the evening, crossed over to the larger house, the Baroness desiring to compliment her prospective sister-in-law.  They found the usual circle upon the piazza, with the exception of Clifford Wentworth and Lizzie Acton; and as every one stood up as usual to welcome the Baroness, Eugenia had an admiring audience for her compliment to Gertrude.

Robert Acton stood on the edge of the piazza, leaning against one of the white columns, so that he found himself next to Eugenia while she acquitted herself of a neat little discourse of congratulation.

“I shall be so glad to know you better,” she said; “I have seen so much less of you than I should have liked.  Naturally; now I see the reason why!  You will love me a little, won’t you?  I think I may say I gain on being known.”  And terminating these observations with the softest cadence of her voice, the Baroness imprinted a sort of grand official kiss upon Gertrude’s forehead.

Increased familiarity had not, to Gertrude’s imagination, diminished the mysterious impressiveness of Eugenia’s personality, and she felt flattered and transported by this little ceremony.  Robert Acton also seemed to admire it, as he admired so many of the gracious manifestations of Madame Munster’s wit.

They had the privilege of making him restless, and on this occasion he walked away, suddenly, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back and leaned against his column.  Eugenia was now complimenting her uncle upon his daughter’s engagement, and Mr. Wentworth was listening with his usual plain yet refined politeness.  It is to be supposed that by this time his perception of the mutual relations of the young people who surrounded him had become more acute; but he still took the matter very seriously, and he was not at all exhilarated.