If he could spare the time!  I laughed outright at the idea.  Why, with the prospect of meeting Gwen Darrow before him, an absolute unit of measure, with a snail’s pace, would have made good its escape from him.  As it is a trick of poor humanity to refuse when offered the very thing one has been madly scheming to obtain, I hastened to accept Darrow’s invitation for my friend, and to assure him on my own responsibility, that time was just then hanging heavily on Maitland’s hands.  Well, the game was played, but Maitland was so unnerved by the girl’s presence that he played execrably, so poorly, indeed, that the always polite Darrow remarked:  “You must charge your easy victory, Gwen, to your opponent’s gallantry, not to his lack of skill, for I assure you he gave me a much harder rub.”  The young lady cast a quick glance at Maitland, which said so plainly that she preferred a fair field and no favour that he hastened to say:  “Your father puts too high an estimate upon my play.  I did my best to win, but—­but I was a little nervous; I see, however, that you would have defeated me though I had been in my best form.”  Gwen gave him one of those short, searching looks, so peculiarly her own, which seem to read, with mathematical certainty, one’s innermost thoughts,—­and the poor fellow blushed to the tips of his ears.  —­But he was no boy, this Maitland, and betrayed no other sign of the tempest that was raging within him.  His utterance remained as usual, deliberate and incisive, and I thought this perplexed the young lady.  Before leaving, both Maitland and I were invited to become parties to a six-handed game to be played the following week, after the grounds had been redressed with gravel.

Maitland looked forward to this second meeting with Miss Darrow with an eagerness which made every hour seem interminably long, and he was in such a flutter of expectancy that I was sure if

“We live . . . in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial
We should count time by heart-throbs,”

he must have passed through a period as long as that separating the Siege of Troy from the “late unpleasantness.”  The afternoon came at last, however.  The party consisted, besides Darrow and his daughter, Maitland and myself, of two young gentlemen with whom personally I had but a slight acquaintance, although I knew them somewhat by reputation.  The younger one, Clinton Browne, is a young artist whose landscapes were beginning to attract wide attention in Boston, and the elder, Charles Herne, a Western gentleman of some literary attainments, but comparatively unknown here in the East.  There is nothing about Mr. Herne that would challenge more than passing attention.  If you had said of him, “He is well-fleshed, well-groomed, and intellectually well-thatched,” you would have voiced the opinion of most of his acquaintances.

This somewhat elaborately upholstered old world has a deal of mere filling of one kind and another, and Mr. Herne is a part of it.  To be sure, he leaves the category of excelsior very far behind and approaches very nearly to the best grade of curled hair, but, in spite of all this, he is simply a sort of social filling.