mine) as a proof that I have honestly written the truth about
myself, from first to last. For the future I must, for safety's
sake, live under some other name. I should like to go back to my
name when I was a happy girl at home. But Van Brandt knows it;
and, besides, I have (no matter how innocently) disgraced it.
Good-by again, sir; and thank you again."


So the letter concluded.

I read it in the temper of a thoroughly disappointed and
thoroughly unreasonable man. Whatever poor Mrs. Van Brandt had
done, she had done wrong. It was wrong of her, in the first
place, to have married at all. It was wrong of her to contemplate
receiving Mr. Van Brandt again, even if his lawful wife had died
in the interval. It was wrong of her to return my letter of
introduction, after I had given myself the trouble of altering it
to suit her capricious fancy. It was wrong of her to take an
absurdly prudish view of a stolen kiss and a tender declaration,
and to fly from me as if I were as great a scoundrel as Mr. Van
Brandt himself. And last, and more than all, it was wrong of her
to sign her Christian name in initial only. Here I was,
passionately in love with a woman, and not knowing by what fond
name to identify her in my thoughts! "M. Van Brandt!" I might
call her Maria, Margaret, Martha, Mabel, Magdalen, Mary--no, not
Mary. The old boyish love was dead and gone, but I owed some
respect to the memory of it. If the "Mary" of my early days were
still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as
this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to "Mary" to
think even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of
her at all? Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of
tracing her in her letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace
a woman who had gone I knew not whither, and who herself informed
me that she meant to pass under an assumed name. Had I lost all
pride, all self-respect? In the flower of my age, with a handsome
fortune, with the world before me, full of interesting female
faces and charming female figures, what course did it become me
to take? To go back to my country-house, and mope over the loss
of a woman who had deliberately deserted me? or to send for a
courier and a traveling carriage, and forget her gayly among
foreign people and foreign scenes? In the state of my temper at
that moment, the idea of a pleasure tour in Europe fired my
imagination. I first astonished the people at the hotel by
ordering all further inquiries after the missing Mrs. Van Brandt
to be stopped; and then I opened my writing desk and wrote to
tell my mother frankly and fully of my new plans.

The answer arrived by return of post.

To my surprise and delight, my good mother was not satisfied with
only formally approving of my new resolution. With an energy
which I had not ventured to expect from her, she had made all her
arrangements for leaving home, and had started for Edinburgh to
join me as my traveling companion. "You shall not go away alone,
George," she wrote, "while I have strength and spirits to keep
you company."

In three days from the time when I read those words our
preparations were completed, and we were on our way to the
Continent.

CHAPTER XIII.

NOT CURED YET.

WE visited France, Germany, and Italy; and we were absent from
England nearly two years.

Had time and change justified my confidence in them? Was the
image of Mrs. Van Brandt an image long since dismissed from my
mind?

No! Do what I might, I was still (in the prophetic language of
Dame Dermody) taking the way to reunion with my kindred spirit in
the time to come. For the first two or three months of our
travels I was haunted by dreams of the woman who had so
resolutely left me. Seeing her in my sleep, always graceful,
always charming, always modestly tender toward me, I waited in
the ardent hope of again beholding the apparition of her in my
waking hours--of again being summoned to meet her at a given
place and time. My anticipations were not fulfilled; no
apparition showed itself. The dreams themselves grew less
frequent and less vivid and then ceased altogether. Was this a
sign that the days of her adversity were at an end? Having no
further need of help, had she no further remembrance of the man
who had tried to help her? Were we never to meet again?

I said to myself: "I am unworthy of the name of man if I don't
forget her now!" She still kept her place in my memory, say what
I might.

I saw all the wonders of Nature and Art which foreign countries
could show me. I lived in the dazzling light of the best society
that Paris, Rome, Vienna could assemble. I passed hours on hours
in the company of the most accomplished and most beautiful women
whom Europe could produce--and still that solitary figure at
Saint Anthony's Well, those grand gray eyes that had rested on me
so sadly at parting, held their place in my memory, stamped their
image on my heart.



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