“The house is very old,” remarked Mr. Wentworth.  “General Washington once spent a week here.”

“Oh, I have heard of Washington,” cried the Baroness.  “My father used to tell me of him.”

Mr. Wentworth was silent a moment, and then, “I found he was very well known in Europe,” he said.

Felix had lingered in the garden with Gertrude; he was standing before her and smiling, as he had done the day before.  What had happened the day before seemed to her a kind of dream.  He had been there and he had changed everything; the others had seen him, they had talked with him; but that he should come again, that he should be part of the future, part of her small, familiar, much-meditating life—­this needed, afresh, the evidence of her senses.  The evidence had come to her senses now; and her senses seemed to rejoice in it.  “What do you think of Eugenia?” Felix asked.  “Is n’t she charming?”

“She is very brilliant,” said Gertrude.  “But I can’t tell yet.  She seems to me like a singer singing an air.  You can’t tell till the song is done.”

“Ah, the song will never be done!” exclaimed the young man, laughing.  “Don’t you think her handsome?”

Gertrude had been disappointed in the beauty of the Baroness Munster; she had expected her, for mysterious reasons, to resemble a very pretty portrait of the Empress Josephine, of which there hung an engraving in one of the parlors, and which the younger Miss Wentworth had always greatly admired.  But the Baroness was not at all like that—­not at all.  Though different, however, she was very wonderful, and Gertrude felt herself most suggestively corrected.  It was strange, nevertheless, that Felix should speak in that positive way about his sister’s beauty.  “I think I shall think her handsome,” Gertrude said.  “It must be very interesting to know her.  I don’t feel as if I ever could.”

“Ah, you will know her well; you will become great friends,” Felix declared, as if this were the easiest thing in the world.

“She is very graceful,” said Gertrude, looking after the Baroness, suspended to her father’s arm.  It was a pleasure to her to say that any one was graceful.

Felix had been looking about him.  “And your little cousin, of yesterday,” he said, “who was so wonderfully pretty—­what has become of her?”

“She is in the parlor,” Gertrude answered.  “Yes, she is very pretty.”  She felt as if it were her duty to take him straight into the house, to where he might be near her cousin.  But after hesitating a moment she lingered still.  “I did n’t believe you would come back,” she said.

“Not come back!” cried Felix, laughing.  “You did n’t know, then, the impression made upon this susceptible heart of mine.”

She wondered whether he meant the impression her cousin Lizzie had made.  “Well,” she said, “I did n’t think we should ever see you again.”

“And pray what did you think would become of me?”