ost careless eye would have remarked
the great change that had come over Van Twiller. Now and then he would
play a game of billiards with De Peyster or Haseltine, or stop to chat a
moment in the vestibule with old Duane; but he was an altered man.
When at the club, he was usually to be found in the small smoking-room
up-stairs, seated on a fauteuil fast asleep, with the last number of
The Nation in his hand. Once, if you went to two or three places of an
evening, you were certain to meet Van Twiller at them all. You seldom
met him in society now.

By and by came whisper number two--a whisper more emphatic than number
one, but still untraceable to any tangible mouthpiece. This time the
whisper said that Van Twiller _was_ in love. But with whom? The list of
possible Mrs. Van Twillers was carefully examined by experienced hands,
and a check placed against a fine old Knickerbocker name here and there,
but nothing satisfactory arrived at. Then that same still small voice
of rumor, but now with an easily detected staccato sharpness to it, said
that Van Twiller was in love--with an actress! Van Twiller, whom it had
taken all these years and all this waste of raw material in the way of
ancestors to bring to perfection--Ralph Van Twiller, the net result
and flower of his race, the descendant of Wouter, the son of Mrs.
Van-rensselaer Vanzandt Van Twiller--in love with an actress! That was
too ridiculous to be believed--and so everybody believed it. Six
or seven members of the club abruptly discovered in themselves an
unsuspected latent passion for the histrionic art. In squads of two
or three they stormed successively all the theatres in town--Booth's,
Wallack's, Daly's Fifth Avenue (not burnt down then), and the Grand
Opera House. Even the shabby homes of the drama over in the Bowery,
where the Germanic Thespis has not taken out his naturalization papers,
underwent rigid exploration. But no clue was found to Van Twiller's
mysterious attachment. The _opera bouffe_, which promised the widest
field for investigation, produced absolutely nothing, not even a crop
of suspicions. One night, after several weeks of this, Delaney and I
fancied that we caught sight of Van Twiller in the private box of an
up-town theatre, where some thrilling trapeze performance was going on,
which we did not care to sit through; but we concluded afterwards that
it was only somebody who looked like him. Delaney, by the way, was
unusually active in this sear