which had replaced the blush of the child, awed me and made my own words come hesitatingly.
"Forgive you? You must forgive me! It was as wrong for me," I went on with a wild idea of not mincing matters with this pure soul, "to obey your innocent request, as it was for you to make it. I am a man of the world and know its convenances; you are very young."
"I am sixteen," she murmured.
The abrupt little confession, implying as it did her determination not to accept any palliation of her conduct which it did not deserve, touched me strangely. "But very young for that," I exclaimed.
"So aunty says, but no one can ever say it any more," she answered. Then with a sudden gush, "We shall never see each other again, and you must forget the motherless girl who has met you in a way for which she must blush through life. It is no excuse," she pursued hurriedly, "that nurse thought it was all right. She always approves of everything I do or want to do, especially if it is anything aunt would be likely to forbid. I have been spoiled by nurse."
"Was nurse the woman who came for me?" I asked.
She nodded her head with a quick little motion inexpressibly charming. "Yes, that was nurse. She said she would do it all, I need only write the note. She meant to give me a pleasure, but she did wrong."
"Yes," thought I, "how wrong you little know or realize." But I only said, "You must be guided by some one with more knowledge of the world after this. Not," I made haste to add, struck by the misery in her child eyes, "that any harm has been done. You could not have appealed to the friendship of any one who would hold you in greater respect than I. Whether we meet again or not, my memory of you shall be sweet and sacred, I promise you that."
But she threw out her hand with a quick gesture. "No, do not remember me. My only happiness will lie in the thought you have forgotten." And the last remnants of the child soul vanished in that hurried utterance. "You must go now," she continued more calmly. "The carriage that brought you is at the door; I must ask you to take it back to your home."
"But," I exclaimed with a wild and unbearable sense of sudden loss as she laid her hand on the knob of the door, "are we to part like this? Will you not at least trust me with your name before I go?"
Her hand dropped from the knob as if it had been hot steel, and she turned towards me with a slow yearning motion that whatever it betokened set my heart beating violently. "You do not know it, then?" she inquired.
"I know nothing but what this little note contains," I replied, drawing her letter from my pocket.
"Oh, that letter! I must have it," she murmured; then, as I stepped towards her, drew back and pointing to the table said, "Lay it there, please."
I did so, whereupon something like a smile crossed her lips and I thought she was going to reward me with her name, but she only said, "I thank you; now you know nothing;" and almost before I realized it she had opened the door and stepped into the hall.
As I made haste to follow her, the sound of a low, "He is a gentleman, he will ask no questions," struck my ear, and looking up, I saw her just leaving the side of the old nurse who stood evidently awaiting me half down the hall. Bowing with formal ceremony, I passed her by and proceeded to the front door. As I did so I caught one glimpse of her face. It had escaped from all restraint and the expression of the eyes was overpowering. I subdued a wild impulse to leap back to her side, and stepped at once over the threshold. The nurse joined me, and together we went down the stoop to the street.
"May I inquire where you wish to be taken?" she asked.
I told her, and she gave the order to the coachman, together with a few words I did not hear; then stepping back she waited for me to get in. There was no help for it. I gave one quick look behind me, saw the front door close, realized how impossible it would ever be for me to recognize the house again, and placed my foot on the carriage step. Suddenly a bright idea struck me, and hastily dropping my cane I stepped back to pick it up. As I did so I pulled out a bit of crayon I chanced to have in my pocket, and as I stooped, chalked a small cross on the curbstone directly in front of the house, after which I recovered my cane, uttered some murmured word of apology, jumped into the carriage and was about to shut the door, when the old nurse stepped in after me and quietly closed it herself. By the pang that shot through my breast as the carriage wheels left the house, I knew that for the first time in my life, I loved.
IV
SEARCHINGS
"Patience, and shuffle the cards." – Cervantes.
If I had expected anything from the presence in the carriage of the woman who had arranged this interview, I was doomed to disappointment. Reticent before, she was absolutely silent now, sitting at my side like a grim statue or a frozen image of watchfulness, ready to awake and stop me if I offered to open the door or make any other move indicative of a determination to know where I was, or in what direction I was going. That her young mistress in the momentary conversation they had held before our departure had succeeded in giving her some idea of the shame with which she had felt herself overwhelmed and her present natural desire for secrecy, I do not doubt, but I think now, as I thought then, that the unusual precautions taken both at that time and before, to keep me in ignorance of the young lady's identity, were due to the elderly woman's own consciousness of the peril she had invoked in yielding to the wishes of her young and thoughtless mistress; a theory which, if true, argues more for the mind than the conscience of this mysterious woman. However, it is with facts we have to deal, and you will be more interested in learning what I did, than what I thought during that short ride in perfect darkness.
The mark which I had left on the curbstone behind me sufficiently showed the nature of my resolve, and when we made the first turn at the end of the block I leaned back in my seat and laying my finger on my wrist, began to count the pulsations of my blood. It was the only device that suggested itself, by which I might afterward gather some approximate notion of the distance we travelled in a straight course down town. I had just arrived at the number seven hundred and sixty-two, and was inwardly congratulating myself upon this new method of reckoning distance, when the wheels gave a lurch and we passed over a car track. Instantly all my fine calculations fell to the ground. We were not in Madison Avenue, as I supposed; could not be, since no track crosses that avenue below Fifty-ninth Street, and we were proceeding on as we could not have done had we gained the terminus of the avenue at Twenty-third Street. Could it be that the carriage had not been turned around while I was in the house, and that we had come back by way of Fifth Avenue? I could not remember – in fact, the more I tried to think which way the horses' heads were directed when we went into the house, the more I was confused. But presently I considered that wherever we were, we certainly had not passed over the narrow strip of smooth pavement in front of the Worth monument, and therefore could not have reached Twenty-third Street by way of Fifth Avenue. We must be up town, and that track we crossed must have been at Fifty-ninth Street. And soon, as if to assure me of this, we took a turn, quickly followed at a block's length by another, after which I had no difficulty in recognizing the smooth pavement of the entrance to the Park or the roll down Fifth Avenue afterwards. "They have thought to confuse me by an extra mile or so of travel," thought I, with some complacency, "but the streets of New York are too simply laid out to lend themselves to any such easy mode of mystification." Yet I have thought since then how, with a smarter man on the box, the affair might have been conducted so as to have baffled the oldest citizen in any attempt at calculation.
When we stopped in front of the Albemarle I quietly thanked the woman who had conducted me, and stepped to the ground. Instantly the door shut behind me, the carriage drove off, and I was left standing there like a man suddenly awakened from a dream.
Entering my hotel, I ordered supper, thinking that the very practical occupation of eating would serve to divert my mind into its ordinary channels. But the dream, if dream it was, had made too vivid an impression to be shaken off so easily. It followed me to the hall in the evening and mingled with every chord I struck.
I could scarcely sleep that night for thinking of the sweet child's face that had blossomed into a woman's before my eyes, and what a woman! With the first hint of daylight I rose, and as soon as it was in any degree suitable to be out, hired a cab and proceeded to the corner of Fifty-ninth