willingly
escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his
anxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these
excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. He
thought it better that she should follow her father in his forays among
their neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with them
as she might be brought into. He tried to guard her future encounters
with them, so that she should not show more than a young girl's usual
diffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one
presence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.

A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first,
returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to
some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She danced
mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing
popularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had already
noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive
as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald's statement had been
the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking in
the particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, her
mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were
unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance she
repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him,
laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her
chaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in
a smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense of
personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names
were nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nice
things to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not help
them out.

Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of international
scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as Dr. Lanfear,
but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured her
cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the
peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw in
him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than
they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his
Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Van