This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary gentleman straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedgedin the remotest corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the occurrence did not rise above the usual.  For nearly a year she had been acquiring the habit of such situations, and the act of offering a luncheon at Daurent’s to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of Providence, and their friend Mr. Jackson Benn, produced in herno emotion beyond the languid glow which Mr. Benn’s presence was beginning to impart to such scenes.

“It’s frightful, the way you’ve got used to it,” Andora Macyhad wailed in the first days of her friend’s transfigured fortune, when Lizzie West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an old and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own improvident family.  Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin.  It was by a mere genealogical accident that Lizzie, falling just within the golden circle, found herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to release her from the prospect of a long gray future in Mme. Clopin’s pension.

The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presentlyfound that it had destroyed her former world without giving her anew one.  On the ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that had ever sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease, and the removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed existence blossomed with no compensating joys.  Shehad hoped great things from the opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her, above all, in various artful feminine ways, to be “nice” to the companions of her less privileged state; but such widenings of scope left her, as it were, but the more conscious of the empty margin of personal life beyond them.  It was not till she woke to the leisure of her new days that she had the full sense of what was gone from them.

Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient sensations:  she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in “on approval.”  It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson Benn had fixed her attention, and the languid effort of her imagination to adjust him to her requirements was seconded by thefond complicity of Andora and the smiling approval of her cousins.  Lizzie did not discourage these demonstrations:  she suffered serenely Andora’s allusions to Mr. Benn’s infatuation, and Mrs. Mears’s casual boast of his business standing.  All the better ifthey could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and round unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment:  Lizzie looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.