d homeward, alone, in the starlight, asking herself
a question. Was she to have gained nothing--was she to have gained
nothing?

Gertrude Wentworth had held a silent place in the little circle gathered
about the two gentlemen from Boston. She was not interested in the
visitors; she was watching Madame Munster, as she constantly watched
her. She knew that Eugenia also was not interested--that she was bored;
and Gertrude was absorbed in study of the problem how, in spite of
her indifference and her absent attention, she managed to have such a
charming manner. That was the manner Gertrude would have liked to have;
she determined to cultivate it, and she wished that--to give her the
charm--she might in future very often be bored. While she was engaged in
these researches, Felix Young was looking for Charlotte, to whom he had
something to say. For some time, now, he had had something to say to
Charlotte, and this evening his sense of the propriety of holding some
special conversation with her had reached the motive-point--resolved
itself into acute and delightful desire. He wandered through the empty
rooms on the large ground-floor of the house, and found her at last in
a small apartment denominated, for reasons not immediately apparent, Mr.
Wentworth's "office:" an extremely neat and well-dusted room, with an
array of law-books, in time-darkened sheep-skin, on one of the walls; a
large map of the United States on the other, flanked on either side by
an old steel engraving of one of Raphael's Madonnas; and on the third
several glass cases containing specimens of butterflies and beetles.
Charlotte was sitting by a lamp, embroidering a slipper. Felix did not
ask for whom the slipper was destined; he saw it was very large.

He moved a chair toward her and sat down, smiling as usual, but, at
first, not speaking. She watched him, with her needle poised, and with
a certain shy, fluttered look which she always wore when he approached
her. There was something in Felix's manner that quickened her modesty,
her self-consciousness; if absolute choice had been given her she would
have preferred never to find herself alone with him; and in fact,
though she thought him a most brilliant, distinguished, and well-meaning
person, she had exercised a much larger amount of tremulous tact than
he had ever suspected, to circumvent the accident of tete-a-tete. Poor
Charlotte could have given no account of the matter that would not have
seemed unju