Madame De Mauves eBook

of two years Euphemia had refused offers enough to attest the permanence of her attachment he should receive an invitation to address her again.  This decision was promulgated in the presence of the parties interested.  The Count bore himself gallantly, looking at his young friend as if he expected some tender protestation.  But she only looked at him silently in return, neither weeping nor smiling nor putting out her hand.  On this they separated, and as M. de Mauves walked away he declared to himself that in spite of the confounded two years he was one of the luckiest of men—­to have a fiancee who to several millions of francs added such strangely beautiful eyes.

How many offers Euphemia refused but scantily concerns us—­and how the young man wore his two years away.  He found he required pastimes, and as pastimes were expensive he added heavily to the list of debts to be cancelled by Euphemia’s fortune.  Sometimes, in the thick of what he had once called pleasure with a keener conviction than now, he put to himself the case of their failing him after all; and then he remembered that last mute assurance of her pale face and drew a long breath of such confidence as he felt in nothing else in the world save his own punctuality in an affair of honour.

At last, one morning, he took the express to Havre with a letter of Mrs. Cleve’s in his pocket, and ten days later made his bow to mother and daughter in New York.  His stay was brief, and he was apparently unable to bring himself to view what Euphemia’s uncle, Mr. Butterworth, who gave her away at the altar, called our great experiment of democratic self-government, in a serious light.  He smiled at everything and seemed to regard the New World as a colossal plaisanterie.  It is true that a perpetual smile was the most natural expression of countenance for a man about to marry Euphemia Cleve.

III

Longmore’s first visit seemed to open to him so large a range of quiet pleasure that he very soon paid a second, and at the end of a fortnight had spent uncounted hours in the little drawing-room which Madame de Mauves rarely quitted except to drive or walk in the forest.  She lived in an old-fashioned pavilion, between a high-walled court and an excessively artificial garden, beyond whose enclosure you saw a long line of tree-tops.  Longmore liked the garden and in the mild afternoons used to move his chair through the open window to the smooth terrace which overlooked it while his hostess sat just within.  Presently she would come out and wander through the narrow alleys and beside the thin-spouting fountain, and at last introduce him to a private gate in the high wall, the opening to a lane which led to the forest.  Hitherwards she more than once strolled with him, bareheaded and meaning to go but twenty rods, but always going good-naturedly further and often stretching it to the freedom of a promenade.  They found many