Harry had never known a woman like Rose; a woman so poised and self-centred, so cultivated, so capable of deep and just reflections, and so religious.  His experience with women had not been fortunate, as has been seen in this narrative; and, insensibly to himself, Rose was beginning to exercise an influence over him.  The sphere around her was cool and bright and wholesome, as different from the hot atmosphere of passion and sentiment and flirtation to which he had been accustomed, as a New-England summer morning from a sultry night in the tropics.  Her power over him was in the appeal to a wholly different part of his nature,—­intellect, conscience, and religious sensibility; and once or twice he found himself speaking to her quietly, seriously, and rationally, not from the purpose of pleasing her, but because she had aroused such a strain of thought in his own mind.  There was a certain class of brilliant sayings of his, of a cleverly irreligious and sceptical nature, at which Rose never laughed:  when this sort of firework was let off in her presence, she opened her eyes upon him, wide and blue, with a calm surprise intermixed with pity, but said nothing; and, after trying the experiment several times, he gradually felt this silent kind of look a restraint upon him.

At the same time, it must not be conjectured that, at present, Harry Endicott was thinking of falling in love with Rose.  In fact, he scoffed at the idea of love, and professed to disbelieve in its existence.  And, beside all this, he was gratifying an idle vanity, and the wicked love of revenge, in visiting Lillie; sometimes professing for days an exclusive devotion to her, in which there was a little too much reality on both sides to be at all safe or innocent; and then, when he had wound her up to the point where even her involuntary looks and words and actions towards him must have compromised her in the eyes of others, he would suddenly recede for days, and devote himself exclusively to Rose; driving ostentatiously with her in the park, where he would meet Lillie face to face, and bow triumphantly to her in passing.  All these proceedings, talked over with Mrs. Follingsbee, seemed to give promise of the most impassioned French romance possible.

Rose walked through all her part in this little drama, wrapped in a veil of sacred ignorance.  Had she known the whole, the probability is that she would have refused Harry’s acquaintance; but, like many another nice girl, she tripped gayly near to pitfalls and chasms of which she had not the remotest conception.

Lillie’s want of self-control, and imprudent conduct, had laid her open to reports in certain circles where such reports find easy credence; but these were circles with which the Van Astrachans never mingled.  The only accidental point of contact was the intimacy of Rose with the Seymour family; and Rose was the last person to understand an allusion if she heard it.  The reading of Rose had been carefully selected