ws behind her, and looking
out on a clump of hemlocks. She was very modest, very timid, and very
ill; she made Eugenia feel grateful that she herself was not like
that--neither so ill, nor, possibly, so modest. On a chair, beside her,
lay a volume of Emerson's Essays. It was a great occasion for poor Mrs.
Acton, in her helpless condition, to be confronted with a clever foreign
lady, who had more manner than any lady--any dozen ladies--that she had
ever seen.

"I have heard a great deal about you," she said, softly, to the
Baroness.

"From your son, eh?" Eugenia asked. "He has talked to me immensely of
you. Oh, he talks of you as you would like," the Baroness declared; "as
such a son must talk of such a mother!"

Mrs. Acton sat gazing; this was part of Madame Munster's "manner." But
Robert Acton was gazing too, in vivid consciousness that he had barely
mentioned his mother to their brilliant guest. He never talked of this
still maternal presence,--a presence refined to such delicacy that it
had almost resolved itself, with him, simply into the subjective emotion
of gratitude. And Acton rarely talked of his emotions. The Baroness
turned her smile toward him, and she instantly felt that she had been
observed to be fibbing. She had struck a false note. But who were these
people to whom such fibbing was not pleasing? If they were annoyed, the
Baroness was equally so; and after the exchange of a few civil inquiries
and low-voiced responses she took leave of Mrs. Acton. She begged Robert
not to come home with her; she would get into the carriage alone;
she preferred that. This was imperious, and she thought he looked
disappointed. While she stood before the door with him--the carriage was
turning in the gravel-walk--this thought restored her serenity.

When she had given him her hand in farewell she looked at him a moment.
"I have almost decided to dispatch that paper," she said.

He knew that she alluded to the document that she had called her
renunciation; and he assisted her into the carriage without saying
anything. But just before the vehicle began to move he said, "Well, when
you have in fact dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!"

CHAPTER VII

Felix young finished Gertrude's portrait, and he afterwards transferred
to canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it may
be said that he had become for the time the pivot and the centre. I am
afraid it must be confessed that he was a de