Chantelle, as Darrow soon perceived, had the same
mild formidableness as the late Mr. Leath: a sort of insistent
self-effacement before which every one about her gave way. It was
perhaps the shadow of this lady's presence--pervasive even during her
actual brief eclipses--that subdued and silenced Mrs. Leath. The latter
was, moreover, preoccupied about her stepson, who, soon after receiving
his degree at Harvard, had been rescued from a stormy love-affair, and
finally, after some months of troubled drifting, had yielded to his
step-mother's counsel and gone up to Oxford for a year of supplementary
study. Thither Mrs. Leath went once or twice to visit him, and her
remaining days were packed with family obligations: getting, as she
phrased it, "frocks and governesses" for her little girl, who had
been left in France, and having to devote the remaining hours to long
shopping expeditions with her mother-in-law. Nevertheless, during her
brief escapes from duty, Darrow had had time to feel her safe in the
custody of his devotion, set apart for some inevitable hour; and the
last evening, at the theatre, between the overshadowing Marquise and the
unsuspicious Owen, they had had an almost decisive exchange of words.

Now, in the rattle of the wind about his ears, Darrow continued to
hear the mocking echo of her message: "Unexpected obstacle." In such an
existence as Mrs. Leath's, at once so ordered and so exposed, he knew
how small a complication might assume the magnitude of an "obstacle;"
yet, even allowing as impartially as his state of mind permitted for
the fact that, with her mother-in-law always, and her stepson
intermittently, under her roof, her lot involved a hundred small
accommodations generally foreign to the freedom of widowhood--even so,
he could not but think that the very ingenuity bred of such conditions
might have helped her to find a way out of them. No, her "reason",
whatever it was, could, in this case, be nothing but a pretext; unless
he leaned to the less flattering alternative that any reason seemed good
enough for postponing him! Certainly, if her welcome had meant what he
imagined, she could not, for the second time within a few weeks,
have submitted so tamely to the disarrangement of their plans; a
disarrangement which--his official duties considered--might, for all she
knew, result in his not being able to go to her for months.

"Please don't come till thirtieth." The thirtieth--and it was now the
f