CHAPTER III.

Although Brant was convinced as soon as he left the house that he could not accept anything from the Boompointer influence, and that his interview with Susy was fruitless, he knew that he must temporize.  While he did not believe that his old playmate would willingly betray him, he was uneasy when he thought of the vanity and impulsiveness which might compromise him—­or of a possible jealousy that might seek revenge.  Yet he had no reason to believe that Susy’s nature was jealous, or that she was likely to have any cause; but the fact remained that Miss Faulkner’s innocent intrusion upon their tete-a-tete affected him more strongly than anything else in his interview with Susy.  Once out of the atmosphere of that house, it struck him, too, that Miss Faulkner was almost as much of an alien in it as himself.  He wondered what she had been doing there.  Could it be possible that she was obtaining information for the South?  But he rejected the idea as quickly as it had occurred to him.  Perhaps there could be no stronger proof of the unconscious influence the young girl already had over him.

He remembered the liveries of the diplomatic carriage that had borne her away, and ascertained without difficulty that her sister had married one of the foreign ministers, and that she was a guest in his house.  But he was the more astonished to hear that she and her sister were considered to be Southern Unionists—­and were greatly petted in governmental circles for their sacrificing fidelity to the flag.  His informant, an official in the State Department, added that Miss Matilda might have been a good deal of a madcap at the outbreak of the war—­for the sisters had a brother in the Confederate service—­but that she had changed greatly, and, indeed, within a month.  “For,” he added, “she was at the White House for the first time last week, and they say the President talked more to her than to any other woman.”

The indescribable sensation with which this simple information filled Brant startled him more than the news itself.  Hope, joy, fear, distrust, and despair, alternately distracted him.  He recalled Miss Faulkner’s almost agonizing glance of appeal to him in the drawing-room at Susy’s, and it seemed to be equally consistent with the truth of what he had just heard—­or some monstrous treachery and deceit of which she might be capable.  Even now she might be a secret emissary of some spy within the President’s family; she might have been in correspondence with some traitor in the Boompointer clique, and her imploring glance only the result of a fear of exposure.  Or, again, she might have truly recanted after her escapade at Gray Oaks, and feared only his recollection of her as go-between of spies.  And yet both of these presumptions were inconsistent with her conduct in the conservatory.  It seemed impossible that this impulsive woman, capable of doing what he had himself known her to do, and equally sensitive to the shame or joy of such impulses, should be the same conventional woman of society who had so coldly recognized and parted from him.