Was it the bruise on his forehead that had perturbed his manner just now when he entered the Exchange?  No, this was not likely to be the reason, since he had been full as much embarrassed that first day of my seeing him there, when he had given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that the girl behind the counter had come to his aid.  And what could it have been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place?  Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the General’s precarious health?  And what had been the nature of the insult which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake hands over?  Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had thrashed so well as to lay him up in bed?  That incident had damaged two people at least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodily welfare, and me in my character as an upstanding man in the fierce feminine estimation of Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set right; my confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed.  As I sat with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of reasoning one little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that John Mayrant was no longer at ease or happy about his love affair.  I had never before met any young man in whose manner nature was so finely tempered with good bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike absent from him, and his bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness as far removed from raw diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it was altogether a rare and charming address in a youth of such true youthfulness, but it had failed him upon two occasions which I have already mentioned.  Both times that he had come to the Exchange he had stumbled in his usually prompt speech, lost his habitual ease, and betrayed, in short, all the signs of being disconcerted.  The matter seemed suddenly quite plain to me:  it was the nature of his errands to the Exchange.  The first time he had been ordering the cake for his own wedding, and to-day it was something about the wedding again.  Evidently the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding made him painfully conscious of the view which others must take of the part that Miss Rieppe was playing in all this—­a view from which it was out of his power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that destroyed his composure.  From what I was soon to learn of his fine and unmoved disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be the right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same qualities which had chilled his too precipitate passion for her, and left him alone, without romance, without family sympathy, without social acclamations, with nothing indeed save his high-strung notion of honor to help him bravely face the wedding march.  How appalling must the wedding march sound to a waiting