“It isn’t best for you to keep up a correspondence, my dear, now that you know that McDonald is nicely settled—­all reminiscent correspondence is very wearing—­and, really, I am more than delighted to see that you are quite capable of walking alone.  Do you know, Evelyn, that I am more and more proud of you every day, as my daughter.  I don’t dare to tell you half the nice things that are said of you.  It would make you vain.”  And the proud mother kissed her affectionately.  The letters ceased.  If the governess wrote, Evelyn did not see the letters.

As the days went by, Lord Montague, in high and confident spirits, became more and more a familiar inmate of the house.  Daily he sent flowers to Evelyn; he contrived little excursions and suppers; he was marked in his attentions wherever they went.  “He is such a dear fellow,” said Mrs. Mavick to one of her friends; “I don’t know how we should get on without him.”

Only, in the house, owing to some unnatural perversity of circumstances, he did not see much of Evelyn, never alone for more than a moment.  It is wonderful what efficient, though invisible, defenses most women, when they will, can throw about themselves.

That the affair was “arranged” Lord Montague had no doubt.  It was not conceivable that the daughter of an American stock-broker would refuse the offer of a position so transcendent and so evidently coveted in a democratic society.  Not that the single-minded young man reasoned about it this way.  He was born with a most comfortable belief in himself and the knowledge that when he decided to become a domestic man he had simply, as the phrase is, to throw his handkerchief.

At home, where such qualities as distinguished him from the common were appreciated without the need of personal exertion, this might be true; but in America it did seem to be somehow different.  American women, at least some of them, did need to be personally wooed; and many of them had a sort of independence in the bestowal of their affections or, what they understood to be the same thing, themselves that must be taken into account.  And it gradually dawned upon the mind of this inheritor of privilege that in this case the approval of the family, even the pressure of the mother, was not sufficient; he must have also Evelyn’s consent.  If she were a mature woman who knew and appreciated the world, she would perceive the advantages offered to her without argument.  But a girl, just released from the care of her governess, unaccustomed to society, might have notions, or, in the vernacular of the scion, might be skittish.

And then, again, to do the wooer entire justice, the dark little girl, so much mistress of herself, so evidently spirited, with such an air of distinction, began to separate herself in his mind as a good goer against the field, and he had a real desire to win her affection.  The more indifferent she was to him, the keener was his desire to possess her.  His unsuccessful wooing had passed through several stages, first astonishment, then pique, and finally something very like passion, or a fair semblance of devotion, backed, of course, since all natures are more or less mixed, by the fact that this attractive figure of the woman was thrown into high relief by the colossal fortune behind her.