Austen did not believe Euphrasia.  On that eventful evening when Victoria had called at Jabe Jenney’s, the world’s aspect had suddenly changed for him; old values had faded,—­values which, after all, had been but tints and glows,—­and sterner but truer colours took their places.  He saw Victoria’s life in a new perspective,—­one in which his was but a small place in the background of her numerous beneficences; which was, after all, the perspective in which he had first viewed it.  But, by degrees, the hope that she loved him had grown and grown until it had become unconsciously the supreme element of his existence,—­the hope that stole sweetly into his mind with the morning light, and stayed him through the day, and blended into the dreams of darkness.

By inheritance, by tradition, by habits of thought, Austen Vane was an American,—­an American as differentiated from the citizen of any other nation upon the earth.  The French have an expressive phrase in speaking of a person as belonging to this or that world, meaning the circle by which the life of an individual is bounded; the true American recognizes these circles—­but with complacency, and with a sure knowledge of his destiny eventually to find himself within the one for which he is best fitted by his talents and his tastes.  The mere fact that Victoria had been brought up amongst people with whom he had nothing in common would not have deterred Austen Vane from pressing his suit; considerations of honour had stood in the way, and hope had begun to whisper that these might, in the end, be surmounted.  Once they had disappeared, and she loved him, that were excuse and reason enough.

And suddenly the sight of Victoria with a probable suitor—­who at once had become magnified into an accepted suitor—­had dispelled hope.  Euphrasia!  Euphrasia had been deceived as he had, by a loving kindness and a charity that were natural.  But what so natural (to one who had lived the life of Austen Vane) as that she should marry amongst those whose ways of life were her ways?  In the brief time in which he had seen her and this other man, Austen’s quickened perceptions had detected tacit understanding, community of interest, a habit of thought and manner,—­in short, a common language, unknown to him, between the two.  And, more than these, the Victoria of the blissful excursions he had known was changed as she had spoken to him—­constrained, distant, apart; although still dispensing kindness, going out of her way to bring Hilary home, and to tell him of Hilary’s accident.  Rumour, which cannot be confined in casks or bottles, had since informed Austen Vane that Mr. Rangely had spent the day with Victoria, and had remained at Fairview far into the evening; rumour went farther (thanks to Mrs. Pomfret) and declared the engagement already an accomplished fact.  And to Austen, in the twilight in front of Jabe Jenney’s, the affair might well have assumed the proportions of an intimacy of long standing rather than that of the chance acquaintance of an hour.  Friends in common, modes of life in common, and incidents in common are apt to sweep away preliminaries.