question was so pertinent to his reflections at the moment that he answered impulsively, “I really don’t know.”
“Yes, that’s the answer, I think, most of her acquaintances would give, if they were asked the same question and replied honestly,” said the young girl, as if musing.
“Even Sir William?” suggested Randolph, half smiling, yet wondering at her unlooked-for serious shrewdness as he glanced toward the sofa.
“Yes; but HE wouldn’t care. You see, there would be a pair of them.” She stopped with a slight blush, as if she had gone too far, but corrected herself in her former youthful frankness: “You don’t mind my saying what I did of her? You’re not such a PARTICULAR friend?”
“We both owe a debt of gratitude to your cousin Jack,” said Randolph, in some embarrassment.
“Yes, but YOU feel it and she doesn’t. So that doesn’t make you friends.”
“But she has taken good care of Captain Dornton’s child,” suggested Randolph loyally.
He stopped, however, feeling that he was on dangerous ground. But Miss Eversleigh put her own construction on his reticence, and said,—
“I don’t think she cares for it much—or for ANY children.”
Randolph remembered his own impression the only time he had ever seen her with the child, and was struck with the young girl’s instinct again coinciding with his own. But, possibly because he knew he could never again feel toward Miss Avondale as he had, he was the more anxious to be just, and he was about to utter a protest against this general assumption, when the voice of Sir William broke in upon them. He was taking his leave—and the opportunity of accompanying Miss Avondale to her lodgings on the way to his hotel. He lingered a moment over his handshaking with Randolph.
“Awfully glad to have met you, and I fancy you’re awfully glad to get rid of what they call your ‘trust.’ Must have given you a beastly lot of bother, eh—might have given you more?”
He nodded familiarly to Miss Eversleigh, and turned away with Miss Avondale, who waved her usual smiling patronage to Randolph, even including his companion in that half-amused, half-superior salutation. Perhaps it was this that put a sudden hauteur into the young girl’s expression as she stared at Miss Avondale’s departing figure.
“If you ever come to England, Mr. Trent,” she said, with a pretty dignity in her youthful face, “I hope you will find some people not quite so rude as my cousin and”—
“Miss Avondale, you would say,” returned Randolph quietly. “As to HER, I am quite accustomed to her maturer superiority, which, I am afraid, is the effect of my own youth and inexperience; and I believe that, in course of time, your cousin’s brusqueness might be as easily understood by me. I dare say,” he added, with a laugh, “that I must seem to them a very romantic visionary with my ‘trust,’ and the foolish importance I have put upon a very trivial occurrence.”
“I don’t think so,” said the girl quickly, “and I consider Bill very rude, and,” she added, with a return of her boyish frankness, “I shall tell him so. As for Miss Avondale, she’s AT LEAST thirty, I understand; perhaps she can’t help showing it in that way, too.”
But here Randolph, to evade further personal allusions, continued laughingly: “And as I’ve LOST my ‘trust,’ I haven’t even that to show in defense. Indeed, when you all are gone I shall have nothing to remind me of my kind benefactor. It will seem like a dream.”
Miss Eversleigh was silent for a moment, and then glanced quickly around her. The rest of the company were their elders, and, engaged in conversation at the other end of the apartment, had evidently left the young people to themselves.
“Wait a moment,” she said, with a youthful air of mystery and earnestness. Randolph saw that she had slipped an Indian bracelet, profusely hung with small trinkets, from her arm to her wrist, and was evidently selecting one. It proved to be a child’s tiny ring with a small pearl setting. “This was given to me by Cousin Jack,” said Miss Eversleigh in a low voice, “when I was a child, at some frolic or festival, and I have kept it ever since. I brought it with me when we came here as a kind of memento to show him. You know that is impossible now. You say you have nothing of his to keep. Will you accept this? I know he would be glad to know you had it. You could wear it on your watch chain. Don’t say no, but take it.”
Protesting, yet filled with a strange joy and pride, Randolph took it from the young girl’s hand. The little color which had deepened on her cheek cleared away as he thanked her gratefully, and with a quiet dignity she arose and moved toward the others. Randolph did not linger long after this, and presently took his leave of his host and hostess.
It seemed to him that he walked home that night in the whirling clouds of his dispelled dream. The airy structure he had built up for the last three months had collapsed. The enchanted canopy under which he had stood with Miss Avondale was folded forever. The romance he had evolved from his strange fortune had come to an end, not prosaically, as such romances are apt to do, but with a dramatic termination which, however, was equally fatal to his hopes. At any other time he might have projected the wildest hopes from the fancy that he and Miss Avondale were orphaned of a common benefactor; but it was plain that her interests were apart from his. And there was an indefinable something he did not understand, and did not want to understand, in the story she had told him. How much of it she had withheld, not so much from delicacy or contempt for his understanding as a desire to mislead him, he did not know. His faith in her had gone with his romance. It was not strange that the young English girl’s unsophisticated frankness and simple confidences lingered longest in his memory, and that when, a few days later, Mr. Dingwall informed him that Miss Avondale had sailed for England with the Dornton family, he was more conscious of a loss in the stranger girl’s departure.
“I suppose Miss Avondale takes charge of—of the boy, sir?” he said quietly.
Mr. Dingwall gave him a quick glance. “Possibly. Sir William has behaved with great—er—consideration,” he replied briefly.
IV
Randolph’s nature was too hopeful and recuperative to allow him to linger idly in the past. He threw himself into his work at the bank with his old earnestness and a certain simple conscientiousness which, while it often provoked the raillery of his fellow clerks, did not escape the eyes of his employers. He was advanced step by step, and by the end of the year was put in charge of the correspondence with banks and agencies. He had saved some money, and had made one or two profitable investments. He was enabled to take better apartments in the same building he had occupied. He had few of the temptations of youth. His fear of poverty and his natural taste kept him from the speculative and material excesses of the period. A distrust of his romantic weakness kept him from society and meaner entanglements which might have beset his good looks and good nature. He worked in his rooms at night and forbore his old evening rambles.
As the year wore on to the anniversary of his arrival, he thought much of the dead man who had inspired his fortunes, and with it a sense of his old doubts and suspicions revived. His reason had obliged him to accept the loss of the fateful portmanteau as an ordinary theft; his instinct remained unconvinced. There was no superstition connected with his loss. His own prosperity had not been impaired by it. On the contrary, he reflected bitterly that the dead man had apparently died only to benefit others. At such times he recalled, with a pleasure that he knew might become perilous, the tall English girl who had defended Dornton’s memory and echoed his own sympathy. But that was all over now.
One stormy night, not unlike that eventful one of his past experience, Randolph sought his rooms in the teeth of a southwest gale. As he buffeted his way along the rain-washed pavement of Montgomery Street, it was not strange that his thoughts reverted to that night and the memory of his dead protector. But reaching his apartment, he sternly banished them with the vanished romance they revived, and lighting his lamp, laid out his papers in the prospect of an evening of uninterrupted work. He was surprised, however, after a little interval, by the sound of uncertain and shuffling steps on the half-lighted passage outside, the noise of some heavy article set down on the floor, and then a tentative knock