But suddenly she darted from her seat and began pacing the room in the strongest perturbation.
“Mocked again!” she cried; “the same cruel fate! my old miserable experience in a new aspect! With everything within my reach, save the one thing I want, I possess the means of all kinds of happiness except that which makes me happy. In every possible way I am pledged to a career and future in which he can take no part. Though my heart is full of the strangest, sweetest chaos, and I do not truly understand myself, yet I am satisfied that this is not a schoolgirl’s fancy. But my father would regard it as the old farce repeated. Already he suspects and frowns upon the matter. I should have to break with him utterly and forever. I should have to give up all my ambitious plans and towering hopes of life abroad. A plain Mrs. in this city of shops is a poor substitute for a countess’s coronet and a villa on the Rhine.”
Her cheek flushed, and her lip curled.
“That indeed would be the very extravagance of romance, and how could I, least of all, who so long have scoffed at such things, explain my action? These mushroom shopkeepers, who were all nobodies the other day, elevate their eyebrows when a merchant’s daughter marries her father’s clerk. But when would the wonder cease if a German lady of rank followed suit?
“Then again my word, my honor, every sacred pledge I could give, forbids such folly.
“Would to heaven I had never seen him, for this unfortunate fancy of mine must be crushed in its inception; strangled before it comes to master me as it has mastered him.”
After a long and weary sigh she continued: “Well, everything is favorable for a complete and final break between us. He believes me heartless and wicked to the last degree. I cannot undeceive him without showing more than he should know. I have only to avoid him, to say nothing, and we drift apart.
“If we could only have been friends he might have helped me so much! but that now is clearly impossible—yes, for both of us.
“Truly one of these American poets was right:
“ ‘For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these—It might have been.’
“But thanks to the immortal gods, as the pious heathen used to say, his blood is not on my hands, and this has taken a mountain off my heart. Thus relieved I can perhaps forget all the miserable business. Fate forbids that I, as it has forbidden that many another highborn woman, should marry where she might have loved.”
If Christine’s heart was wronged, her pride was highly gratified by this conclusion. Here was a new and strong resemblance between herself and the great. In mind she recalled the titled unfortunates who had “loved where they could not marry,” and with the air and feeling of a martyr to ancestral grandeur she pensively added her name to the list.
With her conscience freed from its burden of remorse, with the knowledge, so sweet to every woman, that she might accept this happiness if she would, in spite of her airs of martyrdom, the world had changed greatly for the better, and with the natural buoyancy of youth she reacted into quite a cheerful and hopeful state.
Her father noticed this on his return to dinner in the evening, and sought to learn its cause. He asked, “How did you make out with your sketch?”
“I made a beginning,” she answered, with some little color rising to her cheek.
“Perhaps you were interrupted?”
“Why did you not tell me that Mr. Fleet had recovered?” she asked, abruptly.
“Why, did you think he was dead?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Ludolph indulged in a hearty laugh (he knew the power of ridicule).
“Well, that is excellent!” he said. “You thought the callow youth had died on account of your hardness of heart; and this explains your rather peculiar moods and tenses of late. Let me assure you that a Yankee never dies from such a cause.”
Mr. Ludolph determined if possible to break down her reserve and let in the garish light, which he knew to be most fatal to all romantic fancies, that ever thrive best in the twilight of secrecy. But she was on the alert now, and in relief of mind had regained her poise and the power to mask her feeling. So she said in a tone tinged with cold indifference, “You may be right, but I had good reason to believe to the contrary, and, as I am not altogether without a conscience, you might have saved much pain by merely mentioning the fact of his recovery.”
“But you had adjured me with frightful solemnity never to mention his name again,” said her father, still laughing.
Christine colored and bit her lip. She had forgotten for the moment this awkward fact.
“I was nervous, sick, and not myself that day, and everyone I met could speak of nothing but Mr. Fleet.”
“Well, really,” he said, “in the long list of the victims that you have wounded if not slain, I never supposed my clerk and quondam man-of-all-work would prove so serious a case.”
“A truce to your bantering, father! Mr. Fleet is humble only in station, not in character, not in ability. You know I have never been very tender with the ‘victims,’ as you designate them, of the Mellen stamp; but Mr. Fleet is a man, in the best sense of the word, and one that I have wronged. Now that the folly is past I may as well explain to you some things that have appeared strange. I think I can truly say that I have given those gentlemen who have honored, or rather annoyed me, by their unwished-for regard, very little encouragement. Therefore, I was not responsible for
