“Have you come here to live, Mr. Brice?” he asked.

The Colonel eyed his nephew sharply.  But Stephen smiled.

“Yes,” he said, “if I can presently make enough to keep me alive.”  Then turning to Virginia, he said, “Will you dance, Miss Carvel?”

The effrontery of this demand quite drew the breath from the impatient young gentlemen who had been waiting their turn.  Several of them spoke up in remonstrance.  And for the moment (let one confess it who knows), Virginia was almost tempted to lay her arm in his.  Then she made a bow that would have been quite as effective the length of the room.

“Thank you, Mr. Brice,” she said, “but I am engaged to Mr. Colfax.”

Abstractedly he watched her glide away in her cousin’s arms.  Stephen had a way of being preoccupied at such times.  When he grew older he would walk the length of Olive Street, look into face after face of acquaintances, not a quiver of recognition in his eyes.  But most probably the next week he would win a brilliant case in the Supreme Court.  And so now, indifferent to the amusement of some about him, he stood staring after Virginia and Clarence.  Where had he seen Colfax’s face before he came West?  Ah, he knew.  Many, many years before he had stood with his father in the mellow light of the long gallery at Hollingdean, Kent, before a portrait of the Stuarts’ time.  The face was that of one of Lord Northwell’s ancestors, a sporting nobleman of the time of the second Charles.  It was a head which compelled one to pause before it.  Strangely enough,—­it was the head likewise of Clarence Colfax.

The image of it Stephen had carried undimmed in the eye of his memory.  White-haired Northwell’s story, also.  It was not a story that Mr. Brice had expected his small son to grasp.  As a matter of fact Stephen had not grasped it then—­but years afterward.  It was not a pleasant story,—­and yet there was much of credit in it to the young rake its subject,—­of dash and courage and princely generosity beside the profligacy and incontinence.

The face had impressed him, with its story.  He had often dreamed of it, and of the lace collar over the dull-gold velvet that became it so well.  And here it was at last, in a city west of the Mississippi River.  Here were the same delicately chiselled features, with their pallor, and satiety engraved there at one and twenty.  Here was the same lazy scorn in the eyes, and the look which sleeplessness gives to the lids:  the hair, straight and fine and black; the wilful indulgence—­not of one life, but of generations—­about the mouth; the pointed chin.  And yet it was a fact to dare anything, and to do anything.

One thing more ere we have done with that which no man may explain.  Had he dreamed, too, of the girl?  Of Virginia?  Stephen might not tell, but thrice had the Colonel spoken to him before he answered.

“You must meet some of these young ladies, sir.”