add, was an odd recollection which
gathered vividness as I listened to it--a mental association which the
name of Mr. Porterfield had evoked. Surely I had a personal impression,
over-smeared and confused, of the gentleman who was waiting at
Liverpool, or who would be, for Mrs. Nettlepoint's _protegee_. I had met
him, known him, some time, somewhere, somehow, in Europe. Was he not
studying something--very hard--somewhere, probably in Paris, ten years
before, and did he not make extraordinarily neat drawings, linear and
architectural? Didn't he go to a _table d'hote_, at two francs
twenty-five, in the Rue Bonaparte, which I then frequented, and didn't
he wear spectacles and a Scotch plaid arranged in a manner which seemed
to say, 'I have trustworthy information that that is the way they do it
in the Highlands'? Was he not exemplary and very poor, so that I
supposed he had no overcoat and his tartan was what he slept under at
night? Was he not working very hard still, and wouldn't he be in the
natural course, not yet satisfied that he knew enough to launch out? He
would be a man of long preparations--Miss Mavis's white face seemed to
speak to one of that. It appeared to me that if I had been in love with
her I should not have needed to lay such a train to marry her.
Architecture was his line and he was a pupil of the Ecole des Beaux
Arts. This reminiscence grew so much more vivid with me that at the end
of ten minutes I had a curious sense of knowing--by implication--a good
deal about the young lady.

Even after it was settled that Mrs. Nettlepoint would do everything for
her that she could her mother sat a little, sipping her syrup and
telling how 'low' Mr. Mavis had been. At this period the girl's silence
struck me as still more conscious, partly perhaps because she deprecated
her mother's loquacity (she was enough of an 'improvement' to measure
that) and partly because she was too full of pain at the idea of leaving
her infirm, her perhaps dying father. I divined that they were poor and
that she would take out a very small purse for her trousseau. Moreover
for Mr. Porterfield to make up the sum his own case would have had to
change. If he had enriched himself by the successful practice of his
profession I had not encountered the buildings he had reared--his
reputation had not come to my ears.

Mrs. Nettlepoint notified her new friends that she was a very inactive
person at sea: she was prepared to suffer to the full wi