Gertrude sat down again on that day, and she sat down on several other days.  Felix, while he plied his brush, told her a great many stories, and she listened with charmed avidity.  Her eyes rested upon his lips; she was very serious; sometimes, from her air of wondering gravity, he thought she was displeased.  But Felix never believed for more than a single moment in any displeasure of his own producing.  This would have been fatuity if the optimism it expressed had not been much more a hope than a prejudice.  It is beside the matter to say that he had a good conscience; for the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and this young man’s brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in objective good intentions which were ignorant of any test save exactness in hitting their mark.  He told Gertrude how he had walked over France and Italy with a painter’s knapsack on his back, paying his way often by knocking off a flattering portrait of his host or hostess.  He told her how he had played the violin in a little band of musicians—­not of high celebrity—­who traveled through foreign lands giving provincial concerts.  He told her also how he had been a momentary ornament of a troupe of strolling actors, engaged in the arduous task of interpreting Shakespeare to French and German, Polish and Hungarian audiences.

While this periodical recital was going on, Gertrude lived in a fantastic world; she seemed to herself to be reading a romance that came out in daily numbers.  She had known nothing so delightful since the perusal of “Nicholas Nickleby.”  One afternoon she went to see her cousin, Mrs. Acton, Robert’s mother, who was a great invalid, never leaving the house.  She came back alone, on foot, across the fields—­this being a short way which they often used.  Felix had gone to Boston with her father, who desired to take the young man to call upon some of his friends, old gentlemen who remembered his mother—­remembered her, but said nothing about her—­and several of whom, with the gentle ladies their wives, had driven out from town to pay their respects at the little house among the apple-trees, in vehicles which reminded the Baroness, who received her visitors with discriminating civility, of the large, light, rattling barouche in which she herself had made her journey to this neighborhood.  The afternoon was waning; in the western sky the great picture of a New England sunset, painted in crimson and silver, was suspended from the zenith; and the stony pastures, as Gertrude traversed them, thinking intently to herself, were covered with a light, clear glow.  At the open gate of one of the fields she saw from the distance a man’s figure; he stood there as if he were waiting for her, and as she came nearer she recognized Mr. Brand.  She had a feeling as of not having seen him for some time; she could not have said for how long, for it yet seemed to her that he had been very lately at the house.

“May I walk back with you?” he asked.  And when she had said that he might if he wanted, he observed that he had seen her and recognized her half a mile away.