Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile.  “Has the Duke been carrying her off to parties?”

“You know what these English grandees are.  They’re all alike.  Louisa and I are very fond of our cousin—­but it’s hopeless to expect people who are accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about our little republican distinctions.  The Duke goes where he’s amused.”  Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one spoke.  “Yes—­it seems he took her with him last night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s.  Sillerton Jackson has just been to us with the foolish story, and Louisa was rather troubled.  So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess Olenska and explain—­by the merest hint, you know—­how we feel in New York about certain things.  I felt I might, without indelicacy, because the evening she dined with us she rather suggested . . . rather let me see that she would be grateful for guidance.  And she was.”

Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what would have been self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions.  On his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer’s countenance dutifully reflected.

“How kind you both are, dear Henry—­always!  Newland will particularly appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his new relations.”

She shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said:  “Immensely, sir.  But I was sure you’d like Madame Olenska.”

Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness.  “I never ask to my house, my dear Newland,” he said, “any one whom I do not like.  And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson.”  With a glance at the clock he rose and added:  “But Louisa will be waiting.  We are dining early, to take the Duke to the Opera.”

After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence fell upon the Archer family.

“Gracious—­how romantic!” at last broke explosively from Janey.  No one knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had long since given up trying to interpret them.

Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh.  “Provided it all turns out for the best,” she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will not.  “Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes this evening:  I really shan’t know what to say to him.”

“Poor mother!  But he won’t come—­” her son laughed, stooping to kiss away her frown.

XI.

Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm.

Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations of New York gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity.  As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified.